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THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 


THE 
DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

GODKIN  LECTURES  OF   1909 
DELIVERED  AT  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY 


BY 

ARTHUR  GEORGE  SEDGWICK 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1912 


JK 


COPYEIGHT,  IQia,  BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  August,  xgia 


PREFACE 

Since  delivering  these  lectures  in  the  spring 
of  1909,  I  have  not  had  an  opportunity  to  re- 
vise them  until  now.  They  are  printed  sub- 
stantially as  delivered;  for  the  sake  of  clearness, 
part  of  the  first  has  been  transferred  to  the 
second,  thus  shortening  the  former,  and  length- 
ening the  latter.  I  have  avoided,  as  far  as 
possible,  attempting  to  enforce  my  points  by 
referring  to  later  aspects  of  the  questions  under 
discussion,  presented  by  recent  events.  If  the 
view  taken  of  the  matter  is  sound,  the  passage 
of  time  is  sure  to  furnish  new  instances,  and 
the  reader  will  have  no  difficulty  in  making 
the  application  himself.  As  deHvered,  the  title 
of  the  lectures  was  "Some  Unsettled  Questions 
Relating  to  Popular  Government." 

A.  G.  S. 

New  York,  May,  191 2. 


254681 


CONTENTS 

PACK 

I    Government  by  Design i 

II     Responsibility 33 

III  The  Democratic  Mistake     ....  85 

IV  Patronage  and  the  Machine   .    .    .  115 
V    Limitations 155 

VI    The  Suffrage 189 


LECTURE  I 
GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN 

In  receiving  last  year  the  very  flattering  invi- 
tation of  the  University  to  dehver  these  lectures, 
I  felt  that  the  request  must  be  chiefly  due  to 
the  fact  of  my  having  been  for  many  years 
associated  with  the  writer  in  whose  honor  the 
course  had  been  founded.  To  his  readers  at 
large  he  was  a  journalist  who  spent  his  Hfe  in 
applying  to  public  questions,  constantly  arising 
and  demanding  a  speedy  answer,  the  test  of  a 
rare  skill,  knowledge,  and  experience,  and  a 
devotion  perhaps  still  rarer  to  the  cause  of  good 
government;  in  the  performance  of  this  task, 
without  fear  or  favor,  and  with  unflinching 
endurance  and  remarkable  success,  he  attained 
a  commanding  position  and  influence.  To  those 
who  came  into  contact  with  him  and  shared  his 
interest  in  political  matters,  he  was  something 
more  than  this;  he  was  one  of  the  writers  (the 
list  is  not  a  very  long  one)  devoted  by  their 
natural  bent  to  the  subject  of  the  work  of 
government,  who  have  made  substantial  addi- 

3 


''4''        THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tions  to  our  knowledge  of  the  subject,  and  of 
whom  it  may  be  said  with  regard  to  many  im- 
portant topics:  but  for  him  we  should  not  have 
understood  this. 

What  he  wrote,  for  instance,  about  nomina- 
tions, and  the  dominant  part  they  play  in 
modern  popular  government,  what  he  had  to 
say  about  the  decline  of  legislatures,  govern- 
ment of  cities,  and  what  is  called  the  "new" 
political  economy,  and  Socialism,  dispel  some 
of  the  obscurity  which  surrounds  these  subjects, 
so  that  no  one  who  investigates  them  can  now 
afford  to  neglect  his  contributions  to  this  branch 
of  knowledge. 

In  recalling  this  it  struck  me  that  I  might 
make  these  lectures  of  use,  if  at  all,  by  endeavor- 
ing to  examine  and  state  the  theory  of  political 
action  as  it  seems  to  be  implied  (though  not 
systematically  analyzed  and  expounded)  in  his 
writings;  attempting  in  the  course  of  this  ex- 
amination to  apply  it  to  some  of  the  unsettled 
questions  which  in  our  day,  as  in  his,  press 
upon  us  for  an  answer,  and  which  our  form  of 
government  forces  us  to  answer  as  best  we  may. 
If  in  the  course  of  our  inquiry  we  do  not  discover 
anything  very  novel,  I  must  ask  you  to  remem- 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  5 

ber  that  it  is  a  very  old  and  very  difficult  sub- 
ject, in  which  new  discoveries  are  seldom  made. 
Such  an  attempt  may,  however,  be  the  means 
of  putting  some  of  the  old  questions  in  a  new 
light,  and  help  us  toward  reaching  some  con- 
clusion as  to  the  future  of  popular  government. 
If  the  path  followed  by  him  should  prove  to 
be  a  continuation  of  that  opened  by  the  famous 
investigators  of  the  past,  it  may  serve  to 
strengthen  our  confidence  in  the  possibility  of 
further  progress. 

You  will  notice  that  my  subject  relates  only 
to  one  aspect  of  government.  Government  as 
a  whole  embraces  a  great  variety  of  topics. 
Such  matters  as  sovereignty,  the  sphere  or 
province  of  government,  and  the  ideal  or  per- 
fect state;  the  object,  origin,  and  forms  of 
government;  government  of  the  family,  the 
tribe,  and  the  church,  the  nature  and  powers 
of  government,  municipal  and  federal  govern- 
ment; all  are  parts  of  a  very  complex  whole, 
which  also  includes  a  further  subject  of  inquiry 
— the  structure  and  framework  of  the  govern- 
ment of  a  State,  or,  in  other  words,  its  consti- 
tution by  human  design  and  contrivance.  Now, 
as  government  is  merely  public  business  carried 


6  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

on  by  men  for  certain  recognized  ends,  there 
must  be  behind  its  structure  and  framework 
some  force  or  power,  and  some  principle  of 
action,  which  can,  through  human  will  and 
motive,  accomplish  the  political  tasks  set  it; 
and  the  question  is:  can  any  principle  of  action 
be  traced  in  popular  government?  And  to  come 
to  the  questions  of  the  day,  can  we  learn 
through  an  examination  of  the  principle  of  its 
action  anything  about  these  questions?  Does 
it  throw  any  light  on  the  referendum,  or  the 
initiative,  or  recall,  or  direct  primaries,  or  nomi- 
nations by  petition,  or  the  "machine,"  or  the 
suffrage  ? 

It  is  simply  to  the  constitutional  operation  of 
government,  and  especially  of  popular  govern- 
ment, so  far  as  it  is  a  work  of  human  contriv- 
ance and  design,  that  I  wish  chiefly  to  direct 
your  attention. 

But  at  the  outset  any  one  who  attempts  this 
is  confronted  by  a  serious  difficulty.  He  finds 
not  only  that  there  is  still  no  general  agreement 
about  the  basis  of  political  theory,  but  that 
there  is  actually  a  greater  diversity  of  theory 
than  there  has  ever  been.     Professor  Lowell,^ 

^  Now  President  Lowell. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  7 

in  his  recent  volumes  on  the  Government  of 
England,^  citing  Taine  in  his  support,  declares 
that  one  feels  Hke  exclaiming,  "I  have  dis- 
covered only  one  political  principle,  that  a  hu- 
man society,  and  especially  a  modern  society, 
is  a  vast  and  complex  thing'*  and  that  "the 
only  conclusion  one  can  draw  with  certainty  is 
that  in  a  given  environment  a  certain  combina- 
tion of  causes  produces  the  consequences  that 
we  observe,"  and  that  whether  the  same  causes 
would  produce  exactly  the  same  results  else- 
where we  cannot  predict.  Now,  taken  literally, 
this  seems  to  leave  us  altogether  without  po- 
Htical  theory.  More  closely  examined,  however, 
in  the  hght  of  the  whole  book,  Mr.  Lowell,  in 
his  statement  of  his  conclusion,  does  not  mean 
to  go  so  far.  For  without  some  theory  we  can- 
not be  sure  that  the  consequences  we  observe 
in  a  particular  state  are  produced  by  a  certain 
combination  of  causes.  In  England  there  is  a 
highly  paid  judiciary,  with  a  tenure  during 
good  behavior;  the  judges  in  general  are  ap- 
pointed nominally  by  the  Crown,  on  the  recom- 
mendation of  the  Lord  Chancellor,  one  of  the 
heads  of  the  bar.  The  Bench  is  distinguished  for 
iVol.  II,p.  S06. 


8  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Its  learning,  independence,  character,  and  au- 
thority. Is  this  a  case  of  cause  and  effect?  From 
what  do  we  infer  that  it  is  ?  An  isolated  case 
proves  nothing.  And  what  is  cause  and  what 
effect?  As  it  stands,  we  merely  have  a  descrip- 
tion of  facts.  Is  it  the  King,  or  the  Lord  Chan- 
cellor, or  their  joint  action,  that  gives  England 
good  judges?  Or  is  it  the  tenure,  or  the  salary? 
In  the  city  of  New  York  most  of  the  judges  are 
nominated  by  a  representative  convention  at 
the  suggestion  of  a  private  individual  and  are 
said  to  require  backers  ready  to  pay  a  very  large 
sum  of  money  for  a  nomination.  The  result  is 
-almost  universally  criticised  as  unsatisfactory. 
Without  some  general  theory  of  political  cause 
and  effect,  it  seems  hard  to  throw  any  light  on 
the  cause  by  an  argument  from  Enghsh  experi- 
ence. One  system  produces  a  good  result;  the 
other  an  unsatisfactory  one.  Surely  we  must 
inquire  what  difference  of  cause  it  is  which  pro- 
duces such  a  difference  of  result. 

To  those  who  merely  glance  at  Mr.  Lowell's 
conclusion  it  seems  to  put  forward  formally  a 
species  of  agnosticism  about  government  which 
I  do  not  beheve  he  intends  to  maintain,  but 
which  is  very  popular  at  the  present  time,  and 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  9 

extremely  convenient  for  those  who  wish  to  dis- 
miss the  whole  subject  from  their  minds  on  the 
ground  of  a  supposed  discovery  that  govern- 
ment can  be  nothing  more  or  less  than  what  it 
happens  at  a  given  moment  and  in  a  given  place 
to  be. 

In  reality  I  take  Mr.  Lowell's  position  to  be 
quite  different  from  this,  because  in  other  parts 
of  his  book  he  makes  general  observations  of  a 
searching  character,  which  are  evidently  based 
on  a  general  theory  of  the  way  in  which  man  acts 
politically.  For  instance,^  "there  is  probably 
no  body  of  men  less  fitted  to  rule  a  people  than 
a  representative  assembly  elected  in  another 
land  by  a  different  race.'*  And  again^  he  says 
that  office-holders,  if  doomed  to  lose  their  places 
on  a  defeat  at  the  polls  of  the  party  in  power, 
"will  certainly  do  their  utmost,"  i.  e.,  by  po- 
litical activity,  "to  avert  such  a  defeat."  "The 
keeping  out  of  politics"  and  "the  permanence 
of  tenure  must  in  the  long  run  go  together." 

On  the  whole,  comparing  such  passages  as 
these  with  his  general  conclusion,  and  with  what 
he  has  written  elsewhere,  the  safest  inference  is 
that  he  wishes  to  emphasize  the  difficulty  of 

1  Vol.  I,  p.  90.  *  Vol.  I,  p.  147. 


lo  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

establishing  firm  theoretic  ground  as  to  govern- 
ment, not  to  exclude  the  possibiHty  of  it.  This, 
therefore,  is  a  wholly  different  position  from  that 
pure  agnosticism  which  would  sound  the  knell 
of  political  theory  altogether,  and  relegate  it  to 
what  Carlyle  used  to  call  the  dust  heap. 

But  it  is  not  at  all  the  position  taken  by  all 
the  world.  Down  to  the  period  of  the  Civil  War, 
our  hand-book  of  government  was  the  Constitu- 
tion as  expounded  by  the  authors  of  the  Fed- 
eralist. Theirs  were  the  great  contributions  of 
America  to  political  knowledge,  and  even  now 
it  is  usually  admitted  that  they  made  the  best 
use  possible  for  the  purpose  in  view  of  all  that 
was  then  known  on  the  subject.  But  there  are 
many  who  tell  us  now  that  they  were  funda- 
mentally wrong,  or,  at  any  rate,  that  we  have 
outgrown  what  they  wrote.  Dr.  Woodrow 
Wilson,  the  head  of  a  university,  and  well- 
known  as  a  writer  on  government,  puts  forward 
a  radically  new  view  of  the  matter. 

In  his  work  on  constitutional  government  in 
the  United  States,^  he  says  that  the  writers  of 
the  Federalist,  following  Montesquieu,  made 
him  a  scientific  standard,  with  the  result  that 

1  Page  s6. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  ii 

''politics  is  turned  into  mechanics"  under  his 
touch,  and  "the  theory  of  gravitation  is  su- 
preme." In  this  he  thinks  that  they  made  a 
mistake,  because  the  system  of  "checks  and 
balances"  is  based  on  a  theory  of  "blind 
forces,"  like  those  of  nature,  while  government 
is  "not  a  machine,"  but  a  "living  thing,"  "ac- 
countable to  Darwin,  not  to  Newton." 

Mr.  Graham  Wallas,  in  his  "Human  Nature  in 
Politics, "  looks  at  the  matter  from  another  point 
of  view.  The  study  of  government,  he  observes, 
is  in  an  unsatisfactory  position.  The  early  study 
of  government  always  went  hand  in  hand  with 
the  study  of  Man,  and  about  the  middle  of  the 
last  century  it  seemed  to  have  reached  a  con- 
clusion in  the  pretty  general  adoption  of  repre- 
sentative and  democratic  institutions;  but  the 
results  of  the  democratic  movement  have  pro- 
duced much  dissatisfaction.  This  has  led  to  a 
new  historical  study  of  institutions,  customs, 
manners,  and  man  himself;  and  on  these  a 
flood  of  light  has  been  thrown.  On  the  other 
hand,  but  little  attention  has  been  recently  given 
in  works  on  government  to  the  facts  of  human 
nature,  although  modern  psychology  has  made 
great  advances  in  its  own  field.     Now,  if  the 


12  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

study  of  government  is  necessarily  founded 
upon  a  combined  inquiry  into  the  nature  of 
man  and  the  nature  of  government,  the  present 
''tendency  to  separate  the  study  of  politics  from 
that  of  human  nature"  should  "prove  to  be 
only  a  momentary  phase  of  thought."  Its 
effects,  while  it  lasts,  however,  are  likely  to  be 
harmful,  and  there  are  already  signs  that  it  is 
coming  to  an  end.^  He  thinks,  therefore,  that 
the  student  of  politics  should  begin  "by  mas- 
tering a  treatise  on  psychology  containing  all 
those  facts  about  the  human  type  which  have 
been  shown  by  experience  to  be  helpful  in 
politics,  and  so  arranged  that  the  student's 
knowledge  could  be  most  easily  recalled  when 
wanted. "2 

It  may  be  admitted  at  once  that  these  three 
views  are  all  based  upon  real  and  important 
facts.  It  is  true  that  transplanted  institutions 
do  not  necessarily  thrive,  and  that  we  cannot 
predict  that  the  same  causes  will  reproduce 
exactly  the  same  results  elsewhere,  and  that  we 
have  made  a  great  advance  in  discovering  this. 
It  is  true  that  government  has  been  found  to 
be  a  developing  organism,  which  you  may,  if 

1  Page  IS-  '  Page  123. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  13 

you  choose,  liken  to  a  living  organism,  for  it 
is  an  institution  developed  by  man,  and  man 
himself  is  a  product  of  evolution;  though  when 
Dr.  Wilson  says  that  Hamilton,  following 
Montesquieu,  turned  pohtics  into  mechanics, 
and  made  the  theory  of  gravitation  supreme, 
and  based  a  theory  of  checks  and  balances  on 
"blind  forces,"  I  am  bound  to  say  that  I  have 
not  been  able  to  find  in  the  Federalist  or  in 
U esprit  des  Lois  the  foundation  for  the  state- 
ment. So,  too,  Mr.  Wallas  has  every  reason  for 
insisting  that  if  we  are  to  make  any  further 
progress  in  the  study  of  government  as  a  human 
institution  we  must  found  it  upon  certain  definite 
assumptions  as  to  the  nature  of  man. 

All  three  views  are  of  interest  as  an  illustra- 
tion of  the  fact  that  government  is  always  pre- 
senting to  the  inquirer  more  and  more  different 
sides.  Mr.  Lowell,  impressed  with  the  vast 
complexity  of  causation  in  government,  warns 
us  not  to  believe  in  the  delusion  that  because  an 
institution  produces  certain  effects  under  one 
set  of  circumstances  it  will  produce  the  same 
effects  under  totally  different  circumstances; 
Dr.  Wilson,  impressed  with  the  fact  of  evolution 
in  the  animal  and  vegetable  worlds  in  connec- 


14  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tion  with  the  struggle  for  existence,  finds  some- 
thing of  the  same  sort  going  on  in  government; 
Mr.  Wallas,  observing  the  lack  of  any  agree- 
ment as  to  first  principles,  is  struck  with  the 
fact  that  for  a  generation  or  two  we  have  been 
so  devoted  to  examining  government  objectively 
that  we  have  forgotten  that  a  knowledge  of 
government  without  some  idea  of  Man  is  im- 
possible. The  Sociologists  have  a  view  of  their 
own,  but  it  is  altogether  too  vast  for  analysis 
here.  If  you  will  go  on  and  examine  twenty 
recent  writers  on  government,  you  will  find  that 
this  same  peculiarity  of  great  diversity  in  the 
points  from  which  they  approach  the  subject 
runs  through  them  all. 

None  of  these  views  conflicts  with  a  fact, 
the  importance  of  which  can  hardly  be  dis- 
puted, certainly  not  by  Americans,  for  it  is 
the  assumption  which  underlies  all  constitutions 
consciously  contrived  for  the  government  of 
free  states,  viz.,  that  government  is  not  merely 
something  to  be  observed  and  described,  but 
also  something  to  be  done  by  means  of  power 
or  force  employed  to  effect  the  object.  It  is 
a  branch  of  knowledge,  but  it  also  is  a  branch  of 
action,  or  one  of  what  used  to  be  called  the  moral 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  15 

sciences.  Government  is  a  task  which  is  under- 
taken in  order  to  effect  objects  of  some  sort.  Its 
purposes  may  be  of  every  variety.  It  may  be 
to  found  a  dynasty  or  to  establish  a  free  state, 
to  administer  a  province,  to  carry  on  4  war, 
or  to  raise  a  revenue.  It  may  be  to  do  good  or 
to  do  evil;  but  a  government  without  any  pur- 
pose at  all  is  hardly  conceivable.  Now  a  gov- 
ernment with  an  object  means  that  some  man 
or  men  make  use  among  other  things  of  the 
power  of  other  men's  wills  to  effect  the  object 
in  view,  and  to  do  this  they  must  have  a  dis- 
tinct idea  of  how,  by  what  means,  they  can  pro- 
duce the  effects  they  desire.  To  produce  an 
effect  by  means  of  any  power  we  must  have 
some  idea  of  causation  in  relation  to  it.  Through 
observation  of  ourselves  and  others,  and  of  gov- 
ernm.ent  itself,  we  must  beheve  that  certain 
political  arrangements  lead  through  the  motive 
power  of  human  volition  and  action  to  certain 
results.  This  belief  involves  a  theory  of  po- 
litical action.  If  it  is  founded  on  a  mistaken 
idea  of  cause  and  effect,  it  will  be  disproved  by 
experience;  but  there  must  be  behind  any  po- 
litical contrivance  or  institution  founded  on 
design  a  theory  of  this  sort.    The  necessity  of  a 


i6  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

theory  for  the  work  of  government  is  no  greater 
and  no  less  than  the  necessity  of  a  theory  of 
education  for  any  one  who  proposes  to  train 
the  young,  or  a  theory  of  military  or  naval  dis- 
cipline, or  the  management  of  a  railway.  It 
may  be  crude  and  simple,  but  there  is  no  way 
of  causing  anything  to  be  done  by  human  beings 
without  a  prevision  of  the  means  to  be  selected 
to  effect  it,  founded  upon  a  theory  of  how  men 
can  be  got  to  carry  out  the  design  of  other  men. 
Looking  at  the  matter  in  this  way,  we  cannot 
but  regard  the  manner  in  which  we  know  po- 
litical study  to  have  developed  as  what  might 
have  been  expected.  Government  would  have 
been  introduced  and  established  as  a  convenient 
and  essential  institution  long  before  it  would 
have  occurred  to  any  one  to  inquire  on  what  it 
was  founded;^  and  when  the  inquiry  began  it 
would  have  been  conducted  as  a  single  inquiry, 
as  if  we  could  first  determine  what  the  nature  of 
government  was  as  a  whole,  and  what  the  nature 
of  man  was  as  a  whole,  and  thus  solve  the  ques- 
tion of  the  nature  and  scope  of  poHtics.  As  long 
as  this  idea  lasted  we  should  have  a  great  de- 
bate, but  within  a  comparatively  narrow  com- 

*  There  is  something  closely  resembling  it  even  among  animals. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  17 

pass.  But  as  it  began  to  be  perceived  that  gov- 
ernment was  a  name  for  a  vast  variety  of  causes, 
effects,  and  phenomena  of  all  sorts  pervading 
human  society,  and  stretching  from  the  dawn 
of  history  to  the  present  time,  and  on  into  the 
unfathomed  future,  and  that  man  was  a  name 
for  a  very  great  variety  of  races,  differing  among 
themselves  in  every  way  that  human  beings 
can  differ,  and  existing  in  every  stage  of  bar- 
barism and  civiHzation,  and  as  immense  stores 
of  knowledge  as  to  past  history,  customs,  habits, 
and  institutions  accumulated,  it  would  become 
clearer  and  clearer  that  the  problem  was  in- 
definitely complex.  Consequently  the  time 
would  come  when  the  discussion  would  present 
as  many  different  aspects  as  the  problem  itself, 
and  the  theory  would  divide  itself  into  as  many 
different  lines  as  there  were  seen  to  be  branches 
of  inquiry.  Such  a  stage  of  political  inquiry  we 
seem  to  have  reached;  and,  having  reached  it, 
we  are  now  able,  as  our  predecessors  were  un- 
able, to  discriminate  sharply  between  the  Hne  of 
inquiry  to  which  I  propose  to  direct  your  at- 
tention— that  which  relates  to  the  operation  of 
government  by  human  design — and  all  other 
branches. 


i8  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

As  good  an  illustration  as  any  of  what  is 
meant  by  a  theory  of  cause  and  effect  relating 
to  political  action  is  afforded  by  the  case  of  the 
judiciary  already  referred  to. 

Experience  tells  us  that  there  are  a  variety 
of  causes  at  work  in  England  which  are  not  at 
work  in  New  York,  and  that  if  we  eliminate 
causes  known  to  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
matter  we  may  find  in  the  end  the  efficient 
causes  which  tend  to  produce  a  good  judiciary; 
and  that  these  are  a  tenure  during  good  be- 
havior, a  nomination  by  those  whose  interest  is 
only  to  select  a  good  candidate,  an  absolutely 
non-political  appointment,  and  a  salary  which 
places  the  incumbent  above  either  the  sus- 
picion or  the  temptation  of  corruption.  We  find 
that  the  same  result  follows  whenever  this 
method  is  pursued;  for  instance,  we  find  in  the 
United  States  a  good  federal  judiciary  side  by 
side  with  a  less  satisfactory  State  judiciary. 
We  find  the  same  result  in  England,  New  Jersey, 
and  Massachusetts — utterly  different  communi- 
ties. We  infer  from  all  this  that  it  is  not  a  King 
or  a  Lord  Chancellor  that  we  lack  in  New  York, 
but  a  secure  tenure  and  a  good  nominating 
system.     Moreover,  all  this  reasoning  is  con- 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  19 

firmed  a  priori  by  our  knowledge  of  ourselves 
and  of  man  in  general.  We  know  that  a  judge 
dependent  upon  the  favor  of  one  man  and  the 
money  of  another  man,  or  even  his  own,  for 
nomination  and  election,  and  again  on  the  same 
favor  for  continuance  in  office  and  promotion, 
is  unlikely  to  prove  what  we  want,  even  if  we 
pay  him  a  large  salary;  the  best  men  will  not 
take  office  on  such  terms,  but  will  prefer  private 
employment;  the  men  who  do  take  it  will  be 
under  constant  temptation  to  requite  the  favor, 
and  they  will  most  easily  requite  the  favor  by 
favors,  and  will  in  consequence  sometimes  either 
be,  or,  what  is  as  bad,  be  suspected  of  being, 
corrupt.  From  all  this  we  infer  that  wherever 
you  introduce  the  New  York  system  your  ju- 
diciary will  tend  to  run  down;  wherever  you 
introduce  the  English,  or  the  Federal,  the  Mas- 
sachusetts or  the  New  Jersey  system,  you  will 
do  better,  indeed  as  well  as  you  can  do.  In  any 
government  the  introduction  of  the  system  is  a 
matter  of  prevision  and  design. 

Again,  to  take  another  instance,  the  perma- 
nent civil  service  has,  in  England,  for  two 
generations,  taken  the  place  of  a  civil  service 
manned  by  means  of  patronage.    The  reform  of 


20  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

our  civil  service  has  been  copied  from  the 
EngHsh  system,  and  the  argument  on  which  its 
introduction  was  based  was  merely  this:  that 
as  the  competitive  system  of  examination  for 
entrance,  combined  with  promotion  for  merit 
and  a  secure  tenure,  had,  in  England,  driven 
the  poison  of  intrigue  and  patronage  (developed 
here  into  "rotation  in  office")  out  of  the  govern- 
ment, so  it  would  accomplish  the  same  result 
here.  The  argument  by  which  the  change  from 
our  old  system  was  supported  was  very  hke  that 
relating  to  the  judiciary.  From  what  we  know 
of  man,  we  know  that  patronage  for  a  large 
body  of  civil  servants,  whether  party  or  indi- 
vidual patronage,  means  appointment  by  whim, 
or  favor,  or  for  partisan  activity,  or  for  still 
worse  motives,  and  not  for  fitness;  and  that 
the  only  way  to  bring  intrigue  and  corruption 
in  the  service  to  an  end  is  to  take  patronage 
away  altogether;  that  the  only  substitute  under 
the  circumstances  is  selection  by  open  competi- 
tion and  tenure  during  good  behavior;  and 
that  all  this  has  been  verified  by  experience. 
I  To  make  a  long  story  short,  there  must  always 
-yL  i  be  a  theory  of  political  action,  and  it  is  devel- 
'  oped  by  experience  of  the  nature  of  man,  and 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  21 

the  study  of  cause  and  effect.  This  study  and 
the  experience  on  which  it  is  founded  have  been 
going  on  for  ages,  and  have  produced  definite 
results,  the  most  important  of  which  is  that  we 
now  know  finally  how  to  do  certain  things  in 
government  almost  as  well  as  how  to  do  certain 
things  in  a  physical  science.  They  can  be  done 
by  those  who  are  fitted  to  undertake  the  task. 
The  Greeks  did  not  know  how  to  secure  an 
upright  and  efficient  judiciary;  we  do.  They 
had  very  vague  ideas  of  military  and  naval  or- 
ganization. We  know  how  to  manage  military 
power  and  how  to  create  a  navy.  There  are 
certain  principles  of  taxation  and  currency 
which,  once  grasped,  are  a  permanent  addition 
to  political  knowledge,  which  two  or  three  cen- 
turies ago  were  not  even  dreamed  of.  We  may 
reject  the  Hght  and  follow  the  darkness,  but 
that  is  a  matter  of  choice,  not  necessity. 

A  brief  review  of  some  of  the  more  salient 
facts  in  the  history  of  political  inquiry  may 
serve  to  make  clearer  this  point  as  to  the  nature 
of  poHtical  action. 

All  knowledge  advances  through  dispassion- 
ate observation,  study,  and  experiment;  but 
questions  of  government  so  directly  affect  our 


22  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

hopes,  fears,  tastes,  prejudices,  appetites,  affec- 
tions, and  passions  that  it  is  extremely  difficult 
to  examine  them  dispassionately  at  all.  For 
primitive  man  it  is  impossible,  and  this  is  one 
of  the  reasons  why  we  find  primitive  government 
always  closely  connected  with  religion  and  super- 
stition.^ It  is  of  divine  origin;  those  who  es- 
tablish it  are  the  progeny  of  gods;  on  the  ob- 
servances of  religion  all  success  in  government 
depends,  and  its  laws  have  a  divine  sanction. 
Except  in  the  United  States,  remains  of  the 
ancient  connection  between  church  and  state 
exist  to-day  everywhere,  and  in  most  modern 
states  the  connection  is  very  important;  in 
our  time  and  country  those  who  attacked  slavery 
were  met  by  the  argument  that  it  was  of  divine 
origin.  In  Italy  it  was  only  yesterday  that  the 
temporal  power  of  the  Pope  disappeared. 

But  no  sooner  does  inquiry  into  government 
as  a  branch  of  secular  knowledge  begin  than 
another  cloud  is  thrown  over  it  by  metaphysics. 
In  this  stage,  words,   abstractions,  and  even 

^  What  standing  Comte  has  to-day  as  an  authority  in  philosophy 
I  do  not  know;  it  was  his  opinion  that  all  knowledge  passes 
through  three  stages,  the  religious,  the  metaphysical,  and  the 
positive.  Whether  true  or  not  as  a  law  of  the  mind,  it  gives  for 
practical  purposes  a  very  good  picture  of  the  history  of  our 
knowledge  of  government. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  23 

figments  of  the  brain  are  mistaken  for  things; 
and  causes  and  mysterious  powers  and  forces 
are  attributed  to  them  to  solve  poHtical  ques- 
tions. This  stage  has  lasted  to  the  present  time 
and  accounts  for  the  violence  of  endless  disputes 
about  the  "Nature  of  the  State/'  and  "Natural 
Rights,"  the  "Social  Contract,"  "Equality" 
and  "Liberty,"  and  "Social  Justice." 

The  third  stage,  that  of  positive  knowledge, 
comes  when  we  are  able  to  make  our  political 
conceptions  correspond  with  real  objects,  cease 
to  personify  generalizations  or  treat  them  as 
causes,  and  learn  how  to  analyze  them  into 
their  component  parts  and  reason  about  them, 
if  we  choose,  uninfluenced  by  religion  or  meta- 
physics. 

This  stage  came  late.^  The  revival  of  learn- 
ing did  very  little  for  government;  in  the  whole 
period  from  the  rediscovery  of  Aristotle  down 
to  the  birth  of  our  democracy,  actual  acquisi- 
tions of  knowledge  were  scanty,  while  specula- 
tion still  flourished  in  its  stead. 


^  It  must  be  remembered  that  these  stages  do  not  succeed  each 
other  in  secular  succession.  In  a  given  country  they  are  most 
likely  to  overlap.  In  Japan  probably  all  three  exist  side  by  side 
to-day.  In  the  United  States  we  are  still  grievously  afflicted  by 
metaphysics  in  politics. 


24  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Our  day  presents  the  most  extraordinary  con- 
trast. In  every  direction  the  practical,  i.  e., 
positive,  knowledge  of  government  has  ad- 
vanced with  giant  strides,  while  superstition  and 
speculation  have  fallen  more  and  more  into  dis- 
credit. The  battle  which  had  raged  for  cen- 
turies over  the  "three  forms'*  of  government 
came  to  a  sudden  end  about  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century  and  its  echoes  have  died 
away.  It  can  hardly  be  said  any  longer  that  it 
is  believed  by  the  educated  that  there  is  an 
absolute  best  government.  Law,  which  is  at 
least  half  of  government,  has  been  analyzed  into 
its  fundamental  conceptions  by  one  school  of 
writers,  while  another  has  traced  its  origin  back 
to  the  remote  region  where  they  are  lost  in 
status  and  custom.  The  source  of  government 
itself  has  been  traced  to  the  natural  wants  of 
primitive  man,  while  biology  has  even  found  an 
explanation  of  how  man  inherited  the  earth. 
What  was  to  Plato  the  mystery  of  the  true 
sphere  of  government  has  resolved  itself  into  a 
multitude  of  subordinate  inquiries  into  the  best 
means  of  promoting  the  general  welfare.  The 
mighty  creations  of  the  mind  which,  with  the 
aid  of  scholastic  dogma,  took  possession  of  spec- 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  25 

ulation  and  blocked  the  path  of  inquiry  have 
turned  out  to  be  not  causes  or  real  existences, 
but  abstractions,  generahzations,  ideals,  often 
fitted  now  to  aid  and  inspire  the  inquiry  they 
had  obstructed  before. 

We  must  add  to  all  this  positive  analysis  and 
knowledge  what  from  our  point  of  view  is  more 
important — that  we  have  proved  through  po- 
litical theory  and  experiment  the  possibiHty  of 
accomplishing  definite  poHtical  objects  by  defi- 
nite poHtical  means,  and  of  dehberately  incor- 
porating in  the  body  poHtic  contrivances  which, 
through  the  ordinary  action  of  human  motive, 
tend  to  promote  the  general  welfare  and  ad- 
vance civilization  through  government  itself.  It 
is  almost  a  commonplace  that  many  of  what 
once  seemed  political  dreams  have  become  the 
realities  of  our  day. 

To  mention  only  a  few  instances:  the  means 
as  just  stated,  by  which  a  good  administration 
of  justice  can  be  secured,  are  no  longer  matters 
of  speculation;  they  are  known;  the  means 
by  which  patronage  and  the  evils  of  patronage 
can  be  ehminated  from  the  pubhc  service  are 
known;  the  way  to  destroy  hereditary  privilege 
and  open  the  road  to  advancement  to  merit 


26  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

is  known.  So  too  is  it  known  how  "natural 
rights"  may  be  actually  secured  and  how 
the  tyranny  of  the  Executive  and  his  agents 
may  be  prevented.  We  have  learned  how  to 
free  church  and  state  from  one  another  and 
at  the  same  time  promote  the  welfare  of 
both. 

By  applying  the  principles  learned  under  one 
set  of  circumstances  to  others,  apparently  wholly 
different,  good  administration  has  been  planted 
and  made  to  grow  in  such  unpromising  spots  as 
the  customs  service  of  China,  the  fiscal  service 
of  Egypt.  More  remarkable  than  all,  Orientals, 
supposed  to  be  incapable  of  change,  have  in 
two  generations  grasped  the  meaning  of  political 
progress,  and  made  out  of  an  ancient  and  ap- 
parently stationary  and  helpless  people  a  modern 
nation,  sovereign  and  equal  in  peace  and  war 
with  the  nations  from  whom  the  lesson  had  been 
learned. 

These  things  seem  to  have  been  accomplished 
pari  passu  with  the  growth  of  free  institutions; 
but  little  attention  has  been  paid  to  the  connec- 
tion between  them  and  political  theory.  It  is, 
however,  this  connection  which  is  of  such  ex- 
treme practical  importance.     If  politics  were 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  27 

really  nothing  but  a  growth,  in  which  custom 
changes  into  law,  and  status  into  contract,  and 
individual  property  develops  out  of  communal, 
and  aristocracies  succeed  monarchies  and  de- 
mocracies aristocracies,  and  Hberty  produces 
license  and  license  despotism,  all  our  growth  in 
knowledge  would  only  confirm  that  primitive 
fatahsm  from  which  popular  government  by  de- 
sign was  to  rescue  us.  But  if  political  theory  * 
can  be  used  to  achieve  definite  ends  by  definite 
means,  then  we  seem  to  stand  upon  the  threshold 
of  a  new  world,  in  which  we  may  look  forward  5 
to  indefinite  progress. 

Any  theory  of  government  by  design,  as  al- 
ready explained,  so  far  as  it  relates  to  the  actual 
machinery  of  government  itself,  must  be  founded 
upon  some  principle  relating  to  structure  and 
operation  with  reference  to  the  object  and  pur- 
pose in  view.  The  whole  discussion  about  the 
object  and  purpose  of  the  state  resolved  itself 
after  the  close  of  the  feudal  period  into  an  agree- 
ment that  it  was  the  general  welfare  of  the  com- 
munity. An  equally  difficult  question  had  been 
how  was  this  general  welfare  to  be  secured. 
Bentham,  whose  "greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest  number"  meant  pretty  much  the  same 


/ 


28  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

as  the  general  welfare,  inquired  in  what  body 
can  political  power  be  lodged,  whose  interest 
will  coincide  with  that  of  the  body  whose  wel- 
fare is  to  be  promoted?  The  answer  was  that 
no  such  body  existed  except  the  community  at 
large.  The  human  agents  employed  in  the  work 
of  governing  must  be  made  responsible  to  the 
community  by  means  of  representative  parlia- 
mentary institutions,  and  representative  parlia- 
mentary institutions  must  rest  on  a  suffrage  of 
some  sort.  Bentham  went  farther  than  this, 
and  said  universal  suffrage.  Most  of  his  con- 
temporaries contented  themselves  with  such 
suffrage  as  then  existed. 

Now,  what  I  hope  to  show  is,  not  that  this 
view  of  the  subject  is  false,  for  it  marked  a 
great  advance  in  political  theory,  but  that  it  is 
a  partial  view.  What  it  leaves  out  of  sight  is 
that  government  is  a  very  complex  and  delicate 
piece  of  machinery  of  which  we  have  given  a 
very  imperfect  account  when  we  say  that  it  all 
rests  on  this  sort  of  responsibility  to  the  people. 
The  theory  of  poHtical  action  which  includes 
this  and  is  necessary  to  its  complete  compre- 
hension and  application  is  that  the  whole  struct- 
ure and  framework  of  every  government  con- 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  29 

sciously  carried  on  for  the  purposes  of  the  state 
rests,  and  always  must  rest,  on  responsibility  oj 
an  infinite  variety  of  species;  that  it  is  through 
responsibility  of  every  variety  and  degree  that 
government  by  design  acts;  that  it  is  through 
an  artificial  use  of  motive  in  all  directions 
to  secure  responsibility  (that  is,  to  secure  the 
actual  doing  of  the  work  of  government)  that 
government  by  design  as  we  know  it  has  at- 
tained its  present  importance  and  momen- 
tum. 

In  other  words,  when  Bentham  reached  his 
conclusion  that  responsibihty  to  the  people 
through  universal  suffrage  was  to  be  the  foun- 
dation of  popular  government,  he  meant  merely 
that  and  nothing  more.  The  equally  important 
question,  how  far  responsibihty  in  office  was  to 
be  secured  by  other  means,  he  did  not  broach. 
He  had  merely  found  out,  for  modern  free  states, 
the  answer  to  the  question — ^where  is  the  sover- 
eign, and  by  what  means  can  his  will  be  ascer- 
tained ?  That  this  answer  could  ever  come  to  be 
used  as  a  universal  solvent  for  all  questions  in 
government,  of  responsibihty  in  the  perform- 
ance of  their  tasks  by  the  agents  of  the  sovereign, 
never  entered  his  mind. 


30  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

To  sum  up  what  has  been  said,  it  is  of  the 
essence  of  all  conscious  government  that  its 
structure  is  planned  or  contrived  on  some  theory 
of  operation,  which  again  involves  some  theory 
as  to  the  nature  of  man  and  the  nature  of  gov- 
ernment. The  public  business  is  made  up  of 
tasks  judicial,  legislative,  and  administrative, 
the  performance  of  which  is  intrusted  to  selected 
agents,  who  are  made  answerable  for  them.  .  The 
operation  of  designed  or  contrived  government 
depends  everywhere  upon  the  principle  of  po- 
litical responsibility  to  those  who  design  or  con- 
trive itv'-  So  far  as  this  is  successfully  worked, 
the  contrivance  effects  its  objects  and  the  gov- 
ernment attains  its  ends.  It  is  as  true  of  popular 
government  as  of  the  most  rigid  military  des- 
potism, that  its  success  depends  throughout  on 
effective  responsibility  for  the  performance  of 
tasks  imposed.  By  what  means  is  this  respon- 
sibility to  be  attained  ?  Any  theory  of  govern- 
ment which  does  not  find  a  true  answer  to  this 
question  must  be  useless;  and  may,  if  acted 
upon,  prove  highly  dangerous.  Any  inquiry 
into  responsibility  of  this  nature  involves  an 
inquiry  into  the  ordinary  operation  of  human 
motives  in  the  discharge  of  political  functions. 


GOVERNMENT  BY  DESIGN  31 

This  again  must  depend  upon  the  view  which  we 
take  of  man  and  of  government.^ 

^  At  the  outset  I  wish  to  guard  against  any  idea  that  I  am 
engaged  in  analyzing  the  nature  of  the  tie  between  the  citizen 
and  the  State — though  it  is  hard  to  keep  this  entirely  out  of  view. 
See  James  Bryce's  interesting  essay  on  "the  force  that  brings  and 
keeps  men  under  governments,"  i.  e.,  Obedience.  "Studies  in 
History  and  Jurisprudence,"  vol.  II,  p.  i. 


LECTURE  II 
RESPONSIBILITY 


RESPONSIBILITY 

In  this  lecture  and  the  next  I  propose,  first, 
to  examine  further  what  is  meant  by  theories 
of  the  nature  of  man  and  of  government,  and 
to  show  the  connection  between  Responsibility 
— the  force  upon  which  all  government  depends 
— and  the  view  we  take  of  the  nature  of  man  and 
government;  second,  to  examine  some  of  the 
different  ways  in  which  Responsibility  pervades 
government;  and  third,  to  examine  some  of  the 
differences  between  that  ResponsibiHty  to  the 
people  which  is  enforceable  through  the  ballot, 
and  other  species  naturally  enforced  by  other 
means. 

Almost  all  the  old  writers  on  the  subject  of 
man's  nature  wrote  unconsciously  under  the  in- 
fluence of  the  mistaken  idea  that  a  systematic 
abstract  knowledge  of  it  as  a  whole  was  possible. 
One  of  the  great  stumbhng-blocks  in  the  path 
of  knowledge  has  always  been  the  passion  for 
definitions.  It  seems  to  take  hold  of  the  mind 
in  the  same  way  that  the  incHnation  to  attrib- 

35 


36  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ute  phenomena  to  a  single  cause  does,  and  gen- 
erations live  and  die  a  prey  to  it  without  know- 
ing the  fact./^hen  we  learn  that  complex  phe- 
nomena are  generally  attributable  to  a  number 
y  of  causes,  and  that  vast  abstractions  and  gen- 
eralizations cannot  be  defined,  we  have  made  a 
wonderful  step  forward  in  the  ascertainment  of 
truths  That  man  is  a  "featherless  biped"  is 
as  true  a  definition  as  it  ever  was,  but  confuses 
rather  than  adds  to  our  positive  knowledge 
of  him  in  any  way.  Simple  definition  failing, 
teachers  of  dogmatic  religion  and  almost  all  the 
old  writers  on  government  began  by  assuming 
that  they  could  establish  a  conception  of  the 
nature  of  man  as  a  whole.  Some  of  the  effects 
of  these  attempts  may  be  seen  in  descriptions  of 
the  proclivities  of  man,  usually  much  to  his  dis- 
credit. Thus,  his  nature  is  evil;  he  is  homicidal, 
thievish,  vain,  cruel,  perverse,  gullible.  The 
theory  of  man*s  innate  depravity  and  corrup- 
tion is  very  convenient  for  those  who  wish  them- 
selves to  supply  him  with  government,  for  no 
one  can  possibly  be  more  in  need  of  it  than  one 
innately  depraved  and  corrupt;  and  it  is  indeed 
hard  to  find  in  this  view  any  warrant  for  be- 
lieving that  he  will  ever  be  able  to  govern  him- 


RESPONSIBILITY 


37 


self.  Christians  who  have  held  to  this  view,  if 
conservative,  have  often  cut  the  knot  by  assum- 
ing a  religious  sanction  for  existing  government 
as  a  necessity.  Man  is  depraved,  steeped  in  sin, 
and  full  of  wickedness;  therefore  he  needs  a 
government  to  direct  his  steps  and  keep  him  in 
the  right  path.  Such  a  government,  vested  in 
a  particular  class  or  dynasty,  has  actually  been 
divinely  provided  for  him.  He  ought  to  obey 
it,  for  what  it  ordains  has  a  higher  than  human 
sanction.  But  this  theory  cannot  outlive  the 
beUef  in  the  system  on  which  it  is  founded;  it 
must  disappear  as  soon  as  it  is  generally  be- 
lieved that  no  one  governs  by  divine  right,  and 
that  government  and  the  state  are  purely  hu- 
man institutions.  When  it  once  clearly  appears 
that  man  himself  has  introduced  upon  earth  all 
that  is  good  in  human  customs  and  laws  as  well 
as  all  that  is  bad,  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  found 
our  theory  upon  his  total  depravity,  or  even 
necessary  selfishness,  to  save  him  from  which 
divinely  appointed  guardians  are  necessary. 

The  other  side  of  the  picture  proves  to  be  that 
this  same  depraved  and  corrupt  creature  is  cap- 
able of  acts  of  great  wisdom  and  virtue,  and 
displays  quahties  which  give  him  at  times  a  very 


38  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

high  opinion  of  himself.  He  is  capable  of  great 
bravery,  of  great  self-sacrifice;  goes  to  the  stake 
rather  than  profess  a  belief  which  he  knows  to 
be  false,  throws  away  his  life  for  his  friends  or  his 
children,  often  for  the  sake  of  saving  a  mere 
stranger;  dies  in  battle  gladly  for  his  country, 
and,  in  fact,  continually  furnishes  proof  that  he 
is,  potentially  at  least,  noble. 

I  have  collected  almost  at  random  a  few  in- 
stances of  the  singular  diversity  of  opinion  about 
the  nature  of  man  such  as  every  one  comes  upon 
in  looking  into  the  subject,  which  may  serve  to 
illustrate  this  point.  Mill — if  I  remember  right, 
in  his  essay  on  Bentham — dwells  on  sympathy 
as  one  of  man's  marked  traits,  which  no  one  dis- 
putes; but  he  seems  to  overlook  almost  entirely 
the  fact  that,  owing  to  his  appetites  and  pas- 
sions, antipathy  may  be  at  times  as  powerful, 
and  when  we  reflect  on  the  countless  wars  of  re- 
ligion and  ambition  and  greed,  of  which  history 
is  full,  and  in  which  millions  of  lives  have  been 
sacrificed,  and  into  one  of  which  he  may,  even 
now,  at  any  moment  be  plunged;  upon  the 
countless  judicial  murders  that  he  has  com- 
mitted, and  the  violence  of  race  prejudice  and 
the  massacres  it  has  caused  and  now  causes  in 


RESPONSIBILITY  39 

our  own  day,  we  cannot  but  feel  that  any 
account  of  man  which  leaves  antipathy  and 
prejudice  out  will  be  at  least  as  one-sided  as  one 
which  forgets  the  power  of  sympathy. 

In  Burke's  "Essay  on  the  SubHmeand  Beau- 
tiful," very  popular  in  its  day,  Burke,  who  was 
to  be  the  great  defender  of  popular  rights 
against  tyranny,  makes  the  statement  that  we 
"have  a  degree  of  dehght,  and  that  no  small 
one,  in  the  real  misfortunes  and  pains  of  others  "; 
that  we  do  not  "shun  such  objects"  and  that 
"we  must  have  a  delight  or  pleasure  of  some 
species  or  other  in  contemplating  objects  of  this 
kind."  To  this  he  adds  that  "terror  is  a  passion 
which  always  produces  dehght  when  it  does  not 
press  too  close."  Again,  "There  is  no  spectacle 
we  so  eagerly  pursue  as  that  of  some  uncom- 
mon and  grievous  calamity."  And  again,  "the 
dehght  we  have  in  such  things  hinders  us  from 
shunning  scenes  of  misery."  The  instances  he 
gives  are  the  pleasure  derived  from  reading  of 
the  history  of  the  ruin  of  the  State  of  Macedon, 
the  destruction  of  Troy,  the  violent  death  of 
Cato,  and  the  ruin  of  the  great  cause  he  ad- 
hered to.  We  may  agree  with  his  statement  that 
a  pleasure  is  derived  from  theatrical  spectacles 


40  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

of  a  tragic  nature,  or  tragic  narrative;  but  that 
we  actually  enjoy  the  suffering  of  others  and 
linger  with  pleasure  over  the  misery  of  our  fel- 
lows, most  of  us  would  be  inclined  to  deny  with 
some  indignation. 

Another  illustration  is  afforded  by  the  Decla- 
ration of  Independence.  Man  is  born  free  and 
equal  with  certain  inalienable  rights.  This,  on 
//  the  other  hand,  is  denied  as  a  statement  of 
neither  scientific  nor  historic  truth,  and  accord- 
ingly it  has  been  furiously  attacked  by  all  anti- 
democratic writers. 

Sir  James  Stephen,  in  his  book  on  "Liberty, 
Fraternity,  and  EquaHty,"  protests  that  man 
is  at  the  bottom  not  fond  of  liberty  or  fraternity, 
and  least  of  all  equality,  since  his  great  aim  in 
life  is  to  enjoy  the  fruits  of  superior  wealth,  edu- 
cation, and  position,  an  aim  which  is  absolutely 
fatal  to  equality.  What  man  really  likes,  he 
declares,  is  inequality.  He  loves  to  excel  his 
fellows  in  wealth,  honors,  titles,  power,  and  dis- 
tinction. 

Even  if  we  confine  our  inquiry  to  our  own  day 
and  generation  we  meet  with  the  same  confu- 
sion. Make  out  a  list  of  a  man's  virtues  and  we 
are  answered  by  a  list  of  corresponding  vices. 


RESPONSIBILITY  41 

Enumerate  all  the  appetites,  passions,  and  ob- 
jects of  desire  and  aversion  that  we  can  think  of, 
and  we  are  immediately  reminded  of  the  im- 
possibility of  predicting  what  the  result  of  them 
in  any  given  case  will  be.  The  very  happiness 
which  he  pursues  he  throws  away  under  the  in- 
fluence of  a  stronger  feehng. 

All  this  relates  to  the  study  of  the  nature  of 
man  as  a  permanent  type;  if  we  were  to  go  into 
it  historically  and  anthropologically,  we  should 
find  ourselves  in  a  worse  maze,  for  we  should 
learn  that  man*s  nature  is  not  constant,  but 
changes  in  process  of  development,  so  that  it 
has  been  said  that  the  lowest  savage  in  the 
Australian  bush  is  not  as  much  above  the  anthro- 
poid ape  as  the  most  advanced  specimen  of 
civilized  man  is  above  him.  And  in  one  age  he 
IS  habitually  cruel,  and  in  another  humane;  in 
one  community  a  monogamist,  in  another  a 
polygamist;  in  one  period  governed  by  unchang- 
ing custom,  in  another  by  a  passion  for  competi- 
tion and  gain. 

Mill  observes  on  this  subject  that  mankind  is 
much  more  thoroughly  agreed  that  all  men  are 
of  one  nature  than  as  to  what  that  nature  is. 
But  for  purposes  of  government  it  seems  to  be 


42  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

absolutely  necessary  that  we  have  some  theory 
as  to  this  common  nature,  which  will  at  any 
rate  free  us  from  the  difficulty  of  doing  what 
we  never  can  do  by  definition  or  synthesis.  We 
are  not  on  solid  ground  if  we  can  find  out  noth- 
ing more  than  that  man  is  a  creature  of  contra- 
dictions; that  he  is  attracted  by  ideals  which 
are  constantly  present;  that  he  is  attracted  by 
temptations  which  are  inherent  in  his  nature, 
toward  evil  and  deterioration;  that  he  is  also 
capable  of  a  mental  state  of  indiflTerence;  that 
he  is  both  evil  and  good,  both  perverse  and 
docile,  both  selfish  and  unselfish,  devoted  to 
self-love,  and  yet  capable  of  the  highest  efforts 
of  altruism.  If  you  will  examine  La  Rochefou- 
cauld's Maxims,  you  will  find  that  he  makes  the 
primum  mobile  of  human  nature  to  be  self-love; 
if  this  means  only  that  our  happiness  centres  in 
ourselves,  since  we  do  not  feel  outside  ourselves, 
I  suppose  it  is  undeniable;  it  cannot  mean  that 
we  act  solely  for  selfish  ends. 

Another  cause  which  has  always  retarded  the 
acceptance  of  a  positive  theory  of  political  ac- 
tion— down  to  our  times  in  fact — was  an  anal- 
ogous mistake  about  the  nature  of  government. 
The  problems  of  government  were  first  attacked 


RESPONSIBILITY  43 

as  a  whole.  What  is  the  state?  What  is  our 
highest  idea  of  a  state?  Plato  and  Aristotle 
were  the  first  to  break  this  whole  up  by  showing 
that  it  manifested  itself  under  three  great  forms. 
When  the  study  of  government  was  revived 
after  the  Middle  Ages,  the  "three  forms"  of 
government  were  fastened  upon,  not  as  a  mat- 
ter of  observation  in  Greek  Constitutions,  but 
as  a  fundamental  analysis  of  all  government. 
If  there  were  only  three  forms  of  government, 
obviously  one  must  be  the  best,  and  so  a 
long  battle  began  between  the  rival  forms, 
which  lasted  down  to  the  time  of  Grote's  brill- 
iant vindication  of  Grecian  Democracy  against 
Mitford.  This  controversy  failed  to  settle  the 
matter  because  in  it  again  the  three  forms. 
Monarchy,  Aristocracy,  and  Democracy,  were 
treated  as  if  they  really  represented  three  prin- 
ciples from  which  the  whole  condition  of  the 
state  could  be  deduced,  instead  of  being  three 
different  sources  of  sovereign  power,  which  cor- 
responded to  different  sets  of  circumstances  in 
different  states.  Pope,  a  rationahst,  cut  the 
knot   by   saying: 

For  forms  of  Government  let  fools  contest; 
That  which  is  best  administered  is  best. 


44  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Blackstone  gives  a  solution  of  the  puzzle  popular 
in  his  day  when,  quoting  Cicero  in  his  support, 
he  says  that  Englishmen  need  not  trouble  them- 
selves so  much  about  it;  each  of  the  three  forms 
had  its  advantages,  while  England  had  evidently 
the  best  possible  government  in  the  world,  be- 
cause in  her  constitution  she  not  only  had  all 
three, — Monarchy,  Aristocracy,  and  Democ- 
racy,— but  better  than  that,  each  form  was  ex- 
actly balanced  by  the  other  two,  so  that  neither 
could  ruin  either  of  the  other  two. 

Nobody  who  has  not  studied  the  subject  with 
care  is  apt  to  recall  how  full  all  literature  is  of 
futile  attempts  to  make  deductions  from  the 
nature  of  man  and  the  body  politic  as  a  whole, 
with  the  aid  of  metaphysical  and  religious  specu- 
lation and  of  metaphor  and  analogy,  and  to 
dogmatize  upon  the  nature  of  government  and, 
as  I  said  in  my  last  lecture,  how  very  little  posi- 
tive reasoning  is  to  be  found  about  either  except 
within  the  last  hundred  and  fifty  years. 

For  instance,  a  favorite  parallel  between  man 
and  the  state  has  been  greatly  relied  on  in  lieu 
of  argument.  Man  is  born,  grows  to  maturity, 
grows  old  and  feeble,  and  finally  dies.  So  do 
states.    Hence,  it  is  argued  that  there  is  a  neces- 


RESPONSIBILITY 


45 


sary  period  of  life  for  states  and  that  states  must 
die.  Now  that  there  is  an  eternal  parallel  be- 
tween man  and  the  state  is  true;  it  would  be 
strange  if  there  were  not,  since  the  community- 
is  made  up  of  men — but  it  is  only  an  analogy. 
For  human  beings  there  is  a  fixed  period  of  life, 
and  death  comes  from  inevitable  physical  causes. 
We  know  within  a  few  years  what  the  average 
length  of  a  man's  life  is  and  very  nearly  how 
long  he  can  live.  Even  MetchnikofF  does  not 
imagine  that  we  shall  ever  by  the  most  improved 
regimen  live  more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty 
or  two  hundred  years.  But  there  is  no  physical 
hmit  to  the  Hfe  of  states  any  more  than  to  that 
of  any  incorporated  body.  The  Roman  empire 
lasted  for  centuries.  The  English  state  has 
lasted  for  centuries,  and  may  last  for  centuries 
more.  There  is  no  period  fixed  by  nature.  A 
state  may  come  to  an  end  through  internal  cor- 
ruption; but  it  generally  comes  to  an  end  by  the 
violence  of  its  neighbors.  Again,  man  is  born  of 
woman  by  a  process  which  we  call  reproduction 
of  species;  the  birth  of  states  is  due  to  chance,  to 
force,  and  to  design.  The  point  of  absolute  dis- 
similarity lies  in  the  fact  that  one  sort  of  Hfe  is  in- 
dividual, the  other  non-individual  and  corporate. 


46  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

What  is  government?  What  is  its  origin? 
What  is  its  proper  sphere  or  province?  From 
Plato  to  Jefferson,  as  already  explained,  there 
is  a  long  Hne  of  brilliant  investigators  of  these 
questions  who  try  to  answer  them  by  a  priori 
means,  who  seem  at  times  to  throw  a  flood  of 
light  upon  them,  but  who  do  not  advance  mat- 
ters. "The  Republic"  is  to-day  almost  as  enter- 
taining a  book  as  when  it  was  written,  but  it  is 
no  political  text-book.  Its  principles  of  reason- 
ing are  to  us  in  great  measure  false  and  illogical. 
The  line  of  distinction  between  clear  ideas  and 
true  ideas  was  not  yet  perceived.  Rousseau's 
social  contract  has  become  a  recognized  illus- 
tration of  a  gratuitous  assumption.  The  whole 
fabric  of  definitions  and  deductions  has  been 
superseded  by  the  positive  view  that  govern- 
ment is  a  complex  institution  which  cannot  be 
defined;  that  its  origin  can  only  be  investigated 
by  the  historical  path,  and  that  its  sphere  can- 
not be  laid  down  abstractly.  Of  all  the  Utopias 
invented  by  man  not  a  single  one  seems  to  have 
a  secure  hold  upon  the  popular  fancy  except 
that  of  Socialism,  a  dream  which  for  a  variety 
of  reasons  is  peculiarly  attractive  to  democratic 
communities.    But  the  process  by  which  Utopias 


RESPONSIBILITY  47 

are  manufactured  is  as  well  understood  as  the 
natural  history  of  any  intellectual  figment.  It 
derives  its  life  from  the  tendency  of  the  mind 
to  give  a  causative  force  to  an  ideal.  First  take 
an  Ideal — Liberty,  Equality,  Fraternity,  and 
Peace  are  always  those  which  recur  to  the  mind, 
because  they  are  beautiful — personify  it,  and 
endow  it  with  what  power  is  needed,  and  you 
can  make  any  Utopia  you  please.  The  thousand 
years  of  peace  is  one  of  the  oldest,  although  in 
practice  fifty  years  of  peace  seems  to  be  as  long 
as  human  nature  generally  can  endure  the  strain; 
the  Millennium  easily  goes  out  of  fashion. 

Man,  Aristotle  says,  is  a  political  animal;  and 
this  differs  from  anything  said  before  in  being  a 
piece  of  accurate  description  which  means  that 
he  is  capable,  at  a  certain  stage  of  his  develop- 
ment, of  producing  what  is  called  a  state.  There 
is  no  such  thing  as  abstract  government  or  an 
abstract  state,  any  more  than  there  is  an  ab- 
stract man,  and  consequently  the  varieties  of 
states  are  almost  infinite.  Its  form  may  be 
monarchical,  or  aristocratic,  or  democratic,  or  a 
mixture  of  the  three.  It  may  be  single  or  federal. 
It  may  be  large  or  small.   It  may  have  all  sorts 


48  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

of  objects,  and  in  its  sphere  may  include  any 
thing.  Sparta,  one  of  the  earliest  specimens  of  a 
Socialistic  state,  was  a  camp.  Public  meals,  as 
an  incident  of  citizenship,  were  a  widely  spread 
institution  in  Greece.  It  may  have  a  feudal 
organization  as  in  the  Middle  Ages;  it  may 
be  military  like  Rome,  or  primarily  industrial, 
like  England  and  the  United  States.  It  may, 
like  Russia,  be  very  intolerant  of  individual  free- 
dom, or  it  may  cultivate  individual  initiative. 
It  may  have  a  very  limited  suffrage,  or  a  wide 
one;  it  may  have  an  imperial  head,  or  a  parlia- 
mentary system  combined  with  a  royal  execu- 
tive, Hke  England;  or  it  may  have  a  presidential 
system,  like  the  United  States.  Under  all  cir- 
cumstances, however,  the  following  are  among 
the  features  it  usually  exhibits. 

It  includes  the  idea  of  man  and  a  body  politic, 
subjection  or  citizenship  and  allegiance,  and  re- 
sponsibility to  a  head  in  control  of  the  whole, 
the  power  to  direct  and  change  the  whole  thing 
being  lodged  in  this  head.  This  institution  is 
so  contrived  as  to  do  for  man  consciously 
things  which  man  cannot  do  for  himself  without 
it.  It  gives  him  in  his  pursuit  of  various  objects 
of  desire  security  against  external  and  internal 


RESPONSIBILITY  49 

dangers.  It  may  furnish  him  with  other  things; 
for  instance,  it  has  furnished  him  with  a  calen- 
dar, with  education,  with  reHgion,  and  it  can 
furnish  him  with  food,  clothing,  and  all  the  ne- 
cessities of  Hfe;  that  is,  it  may  directly  furnish 
him  with  objects  of  desire,  or  it  may  secure  him 
in  the  pursuit  of  these  objects.  It  enforces 
promises,  and  redresses  the  wrongs  done  by  his 
neighbor,  or  prevents  them  (the  whole  body  of 
the  civil  law).  It  furnishes  him  with  a  poHce 
and  with  soldiers  and  sailors  for  defence  exter- 
nally. Leaving  out  of  view  foreigners,  it  pro- 
vides all  this  for  its  citizens  living  within  a  def- 
inite boundary.  It  always  acts  through  human 
agents,  and  all  its  powers  and  functions  may  be 
united  in  the  hands  of  a  single  person.  In  this 
case,  the  abstraction  which  we  know  as  sover- 
eignty becomes  indistinguishable  from  the  in- 
dividual who  is  called  the  sovereign.  Under 
ordinary  circumstances,  an  absolute  sovereign 
is  obhged  to  delegate  most  of  his  power  among 
various  agents,  so  that  there  is  even  here  a  dis- 
tribution of  powers;  and  a  classification  of  them 
becomes  possible.  In  the  opposite  case,  of  the 
supreme  power  being  lodged  in  the  body  of  the 
community,  all  the  ideas  connected  with  it  are 


50  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

vastly  more  complicated.  The  body  politic 
then  becomes  very  like  an  ordinary  corporation. 
Like  any  other  corporation,  its  powers  are 
exercised  by  agents,  while  the  activity  of  the 
sovereign  is  mainly  confined  to  selecting  those 
who  are  to  so  exercise  its  powers,  or  to  de- 
ciding questions  submitted  to  it  by  itself  or  its 
own  agents. 

Looking  at  the  matter  in  this  way,  we  need 
not  for  our  purposes  trouble  ourselves  about  the 
historical  origin  of  government.  This  really 
concerns  us  little  more  than  the  origin  of  life. 
Probably  governments  were  of  diverse  origin. 
At  any  rate,  the  origin  of  almost  all  of  them  is 
lost  in  the  night  of  time.  All  that  is  necessary 
for  us  to  consider  is  that  we  find  in  a  vast  num- 
ber of  actually  existing  governments  the  feat- 
ures mentioned;  and  that  when  a  state  is  cre- 
ated, the  contrivance,  or  institution,  is  super- 
imposed upon  the  habits  and  customs  of  the 
community  already  existing  and  handed  down 
from  father  to  son  for  generations  Existing 
customs  are  presupposed  in  governments;  gov- 
ernment is  itself  an  artificial  institution  based 
in  great  measure  on  custom;  and  we  should  add 
to  our  collection  of  fundamental  facts  that  habit 


RESPONSIBILITY  51 

and  custom  in  man  are  coeval  with  his  existence, 
are  much  older  than  either  law  or  government, 
and  are  capable  of  transmission,  conscious  or 
unconscious,  from  generation  to  generation. 
Nor  can  we  leave  out  of  view  morality  or  re- 
ligion, but  into  the  origin  of  these  again  it  is 
not  necessary  for  us  to  inquire.  We  take  the 
moral  system  and  religion  of  a  state  as  a  fact. 

In  all  states,  even  in  self-governing  communi- 
ties, government  is  carried  on  by  a  minority 
of  the  whole — with  us  the  body  of  adult  men. 
And  it  is  in  the  hands  of  a  still  smaller  number 
that  political  power  is  actually  from  day  to  day 
lodged.  The  popular  sovereign  holds  his  power 
ordinarily  in  reserve.  The  work  of  government 
he  intrusts  to  subordinates.  This  fact,  in  the 
discussion  of  these  matters,  seems  to  have  been 
resented,  and  its  existence  is  often  denied  by 
advocates  of  the  democratic  form.  In  Tammany 
Hall,  in  which  one  man  rules  supreme,  and  in 
which  he  selects  every  candidate  for  office,  it 
is  annually  pretended  by  him  and  his  followers 
that  he  does  not  know  in  advance  what  "the 
slate"  is  going  to  be  until  the  convention  has 
deHberated  upon  it.  This  pretence,  however, 
is  the  tribute  which  the  machine  pays  to  democ- 


52  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

racy.  But  the  fact  can  hardly  be  disputed.  It 
corresponds  with  the  fact  that  a  small  number 
lead  in  science,  invention,  the  arts,  etc.,  in  which 
case  it  is  not  questioned,  probably  because  they 
do  not  attempt  to  govern.  The  initiative  in 
every  direction  generally  comes  from  one  or  a 
small  number. 

Now,  taking  all  of  this  for  granted,  the  only 
principle  of  action  on  which  the  sovereign — oney 
Y^  cirjew^or  many^—c^n  rely  to  get  his  work  done 
is  that  invoked  by  such  widely  different  writers 
as  Bentham  and  Hamilton — Responsjbility.  It 
is  invoked  by  these  two  writers  for  different, 
though  related,  purposes.  Bentham,  whose  ob- 
ject was  to  answer  the  question,  by  what  means 
are  the  abuses  of  political  power  to  be  held  in 
check.?  answers  it  by  saying  through  responsi- 
bility to  the  only  body  of  persons  whose  interest 
accords  with  the  welfare  of  the  community  and 
good  government;  i.  e.y  the  majority  of  the 
community  through  the  ballot.  Hamilton,  in 
the  Federalist,  relies  upon  it,  though  he  does  not 
perhaps  expound  it,  as  the  mainspring  of  gov- 
ernment itself.  The  idea  of  legal  responsibility 
is  a  commonplace.  It  has  been  studied  for  cen- 
turies.   That  of  poHtical  responsibihty,  of  which 


RESPONSIBILITY  53 

legal  responsibility  is  a  branch,  had  been,  before 
the  publication  of  the  Federalist,  hardly  written 
about  at  all. 

So  far  as  the  government  of  a  state  is  a  human 
contrivance  and  based  on  man's  being  a  political 
animal,  it  implies,  as  has  been  stated,  that  there 
are  always  those  who  govern  and  those  who 
are  governed,  for  certain  political  ends.  That 
in  a  democracy  those  who  govern  are  also  gov- 
erned does  not  matter.  The  work  of  govern- 
ment from  day  to  day  is  still  done  by  a  few. 
Neither  a  popular  sovereign,  nor  a  sovereign  who 
is  a  single  human  being,  governs  without  employ- 
ing agents,  and  the  relation  between  these  agents 
and  the  sovereign  we  describe  as  one  of  respon- 
sibility. Those  who  actually  discharge  the  func- 
tions of  government,  whether  as  judges,  legis- 
lators, governors,  sheriffs,  or  postmasters,  or 
tree-wardens,  are  responsible  either  directly  to 
the  sovereign  or  to  some  representative  of  the 
sovereign,  who  derives  his  powers  from  the 
sovereign.  This  responsibility  is  partly  ethical, 
because  it  arises  out  of  the  relation  itself.  We 
say  that  any  one  who  undertakes  the  perform- 
ance of  a  duty  is  morally  bound  to  the  perform- 
ance of  it.    It  may  also  be  religious.    Where  a 


54  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

state  appoints  priests  the  appointee  no  doubt 
feels  his  political  accountability  re-enforced  by 
that  to  a  higher  power.  But  political  responsi- 
bility in  itself  is  something  different  from  and 
additional  to  all  this.  It  means  that  the  govern- 
ment itself  imposes  on  the  agent  himself  a  re- 
sponsibility to  itself,  which  is  binding,  apart  from 
any  moral  or  religious  accountability  that  there 
may  be.  That  man  is  able  to  secure  for  the 
state  and  willing  to  accept  toward  the  state  this 
kind  of  responsibility  is  what  makes  govern- 
ment possible;  without  it  there  could  be  none. 
;  Responsibility,  then,  may  be  dissociated  in  the 
!  mind  from  questions  of  habit,  or  customs,  or 
opinions,  or  sentiments.  These  are  matters  of 
growth,  debate,  conviction,  and  feeling.  By 
those  who  undertake,  whether  of  their  own  ac- 
cord or  by  the  invitation  of  others,  to  admin- 
ister government,  all  these  are  found,  it  may  be 
said,  "in  place."  Government  takes  them  for 
granted.  It  may  try  to  modify  them  in  its  own 
interest;  but  whether  it  does  this  or  not,  its 
operation,  relating  solely  to  the  functions  of  the 
government  and  the  tasks  it  undertakes,  may 
be  distinguished  from  them.  When  Poland  was 
divided   among  its   more   powerful   neighbors. 


RESPONSIBILITY 


55 


they  found  among  its  habits  a  common  language 
dear  to  the  inhabitants.  When  one  of  them 
made  up  his  mind  to  suppress  this  language 
within  the  part  of  Poland  taken  by  him,  he  took 
that  repulsive  task  within  the  scope  of  the  sphere 
or  province  of  government;  but  the  means  by 
which  he  undertook  to  suppress  it  were  human 
agents.  These  agents  were  instructed  to  sup- 
plant one  language  with  another,  and  because 
they  could  be  made  responsible  in  a  variety  of 
ways  the  work  was  more  or  less  thoroughly 
done. 

When  the  South  was  conquered  by  the  North 
and  the  Union  restored,  the  suffrage  was  given 
to  the  blacks,  and  the  occupation  of  the  South 
by  troops  and  a  variety  of  other  agents  was 
continued  for  the  purpose  of  securing  the  exer- 
cise of  the  right.  Those  in  control  were  held 
responsible  for  the  result,  and  accordingly,  so 
long  as  this  system  was  kept  up,  poHtical  power 
in  the  several  States  was  practically  vested  in 
the  negroes.  This  was  totally  contrary  to  the 
habits  of  the  two  races,  and  for  the  time  being 
suppressed  them;  but  when  the  troops  were 
withdrawn  this  regime  came  to  an  end,  the  race 
habits  reasserted  themselves,  and  the  negro  su- 


56 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 


premacy  disappeared.  This  is  a  perfect  instance 
of  what  I  mean  when  I  say  that  poHtical  respon- 
sibility may  be  a  contrivance  for  designed  ends 
quite  different  from  a  natural  growth,  such  as 
a  custom. 

Persecution  and  massacre  have  been  used  from 
the  earliest  times,  and  are  still  used  by  govern- 
ments called  civilized,  to  accompHsh  political 
objects.  Depopulation  and  extermination  of 
disagreeable  neighbors  were  once  thought  to  be 
within  the  legitimate  "sphere  of  government.*' 
These  ends  are  accomplished  generally  through 
the  military  arm  of  the  state,  on  the  pretext  of 
self-defence  or  self-protection.  No  better  in- 
stance could  be  given  of  responsibihty.  The 
agents  employed  are  called  upon  to  destroy  the 
Hves  and  property  of  unarmed  and  defenceless 
people  with  whom  they  have  no  quarrel.  That 
men  can  always  be  found  to  do  this  horrible 
work  is  a  strong  illustration  of  the  tremendous 
force  of  the  principle  of  political  responsibility 
pushed  to  its  logical  extreme.  It  is  not,  as  Lord 
Brougham  ludicrously  pretended,  the  lawyer 
who  may  be  called  upon  by  his  responsibility  to 
his  client  to  ruin  everything  that  is  worth  living 
for,  but  the  soldier,  who  is  made  responsible  for 


RESPONSIBILITY  57 

absolute  obedience  to  the  orders  of  his  superior, 
no  matter  how  shocking  the  consequences.  But 
the  military  function  of  the  state  is  one  of  the 
oldest  and  most  universal  among  men.  The 
principle  of  military  responsibihty  is  absolute 
obedience. 

The  Ship  of  State  used  to  be  a  favorite  figure. 
Sir  John  Seeley  has  pointed  out  that  our  concep- 
tion of  government  in  general  certainly  ought  to 
include  that  of  a  vessel;  and  as  an  illustration 
of  responsibihty  analogous  to  that  in  the  poHtical 
world  nothing  could  be  better.  What  is  it  that 
in  the  last  resort  the  captain  falls  back  upon  to 
maintain  that  discipline  without  which  the  ship 
and  everybody  on  board  would  be  in  constant 
peril?  An  iron  responsibihty  to  him,  which 
means  that  the  extreme  penalty  is  death.  We 
are  so  accustomed  to  this  that  we  do  not  think 
of  it,  but  in  earlier  times  when  sea-going  was 
chiefly  coastwise,  the  ship's  company  on  the 
-^gean  did  not  recognize  any  such  necessity; 
their  nautical  habits  led  them  to  look  upon  a 
voyage  as  a  venture  in  which  every  one  in  case 
of  danger  should  have  his  say.  The  absolute 
power  of  the  captain  and  absolute  responsibility 
of  the  officers  and  crew  are  an  artificial  con- 


M 


58  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

trivance  and   the  mature  invention  of  better 
seamen. 

Responsibility,  then,  I  take  to  be  the  funda- 
mental spring  of  everything  in  government. 
The  success  of  its  employment  is  a  test  of  civ- 
ilization. It  exists  in  a  family,  it  exists  in  a 
tribe,  and  a  fortiori,  it  exists  in  a  state,  i.  e.,  in 
a  community  Hving  within  a  separate  territory, 
bound  together  by  common  laws,  subject  to  a 
common  sovereign.  It  is  the  use  of  an  artificial 
system  of  responsibihty  by  the  state  with  which 
we  have  to  do,  and  especially  by  the  state  under 
a  popular  form  of  government.  You  will  observe 
that  I  am  at  any  rate  more  modest  in  my  de- 
mands upon  your  assent  than  most  writers  on 
this  subject.  For  I  ask  you  to  admit,  what 
has  been  generally  conceded  since  Aristotle's 
time,  that  man  is  a  political  or  state-making 
animal;  and  also  that  he  effects  pohtical  ob- 
jects through  use  of  an  observed  fact  behind 
which  we  cannot  go,  viz.,  that  one  man  can  in- 
duce another  to  undertake  and  become  responsi- 
ble for  the  performance  of  political  tasks.  What 
the  means  employed  are  does  not,  at  this  stage 
of  our  inquiry,  matter.  It  may  be  persuasion, 
it  may  be  force,  it  may  be  some  tie  of  blood  or 


A 


RESPONSIBILITY 


59 


habit,  it  may  be  simply  by  furnishing  him  with 
the  means  of  support;  it  may  be  by  place,  rank, 
honors,  and  promotion.  Whatever  it  is,  it  re- 
sults in  responsibility;  that  is,  answerabiUty, 
and  not  answerabiUty  to  God  or  the  moral  law 
(though  these  may  coexist  with  it),  but  poHtical 
answerabiUty.  What  we  mean  by  poUtical  ends 
we  need  not  define,  because  every  state  and 
every  age  gives  them  a  more  elastic  or  more 
restricted  meaning.  Whatever  they  are,  the 
means  by  which  responsibiUty  for  pubUc  work 
is  secured  are  such  as  we  have  described.  To 
suppose  that  responsibility  in  a  free  government 
is  merely  coextensive  with  responsibility  to  the 
electorate  through  the  ballot  is  to  introduce 
confusion  into  the  subject. 

ResponsibiUty,  then,  is  the  root  of  the  power 
of  the  state;  it  is  a  force  which  cannot  act  except 
through  human  motive;  and  it  is  clear  that  the  ' 
persons  acted  upon  must  be  agents,  mediate  or 
immediate,  of  the  sovereign;  and  to  verify  this, 
so  far  as  it  concerns  our  own  government,  you 
have  only  to  look  into  the  constitution  and 
statutes  of  any  American  state.  These  agents 
must  discharge  some  function,  and  for  that 
purpose  have  the  requisite  power;  that  is,  they 


-    V 


6o  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

must  be  judges,  representatives,  senators,  gov- 
ernors, assessors,  selectmen;  and  the  function 
is  prescribed  for  them  by  the  constitution  and 
laws  adopted  by  the  sovereign  or  its  agents. 
They  must  consequently  be  appointed  or  elected 
to  their  offices,  which  they  must  hold  by  a 
longer  or  shorter  tenure,  and  they  must  either 
discharge  their  duties  gratuitously,  or  they  must 
be  recompensed  by  the  state.  Their  tenure  may 
be  for  life,  for  good  behavior,  for  a  limited  term; 
or  during  the  pleasure  of  the  sovereign;  it  might 
be,  as  elsewhere,  hereditary. 

When  we  talk  of  these  agents  being  vested 
with  power,  what  is  meant  is  that,  as  the  sover- 
eign is  conceived  of  as  the  source  of  all  power,  he 
might  discharge  the  function  without  resorting 
to  agents.  Early  kings,  for  instance,  were  also 
judges  and  commanders  in  chief.  In  Athens 
the  whole  body  of  citizens  tried  cases.  When 
judicial  power  is  delegated  to  agents,  we  con- 
ceive of  the  courts  having  for  the  time  the 
whole  judicial  power  which  the  sovereign  peo- 
ple possess  or  the  king  possesses. 

When  we  talk  about  motives  being  acted  upon, 
we  are  obliged  to  return  to  what  we  observed 
about  man,  and  insist  that  there  are  constant 


RESPONSIBILITY  6i 

motives  which  can  be  acted  upon  so  as  to  result 
in  political  responsibility.  We  find  as  a  matter 
of  fact  that  among  the  motives  always  relied 
upon  as  constant  have  been  the  necessity  of 
support,  the  desire  for  power,  the  dread  of 
"censure"  or  opinion,  or  of  punishment,  and 
the  love  of  approval,  rank,  honor,  and  reward. 
That  is,  in  addition  to  all  sorts  of  moral  and 
rehgious  motives,  these  are  the  motives  com- 
monly appealed  to  to  secure  responsibility.  And 
they  have  been  found  sufficient.  It  is  as  well 
established  as  any  fact  can  be  that  by  resorting 
to  this  system  all  the  governments  in  the  world 
have  been  estabhshed,  and  are  in  operation. 

It  may  be  worth  while  to  observe  that  this 
shows  one  respect  in  which  the  life  of  the  body 
politic  is  analogous  to  that  of  the  natural  man. 
Man  is  sovereign  over  his  own  affairs,  as  the 
state  is  sovereign  over  him;  he  himself  is  under 
a  moral  responsibility,  which  means  an  account- 
ability for  his  acts  for  violations  of  what  we  call 
the  moral  order  of  the  universe.  This  moral 
order  operates  through  a  system  of  rewards  and 
punishments,  z.  ^.,  through  motives,  and,  if  we 
go  one  step  farther  and  introduce  a  religious 
sovereign,  we  are  forced  to  admit  that  he  too 


62  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

governs  the  world  exactly  as  an  earthly  sovereign 
does,  through  the  principle  of  responsibihty. 

Now,  all  this  theory  runs  by  implication 
through  the  pages  of  the  Federalist,  and  it  is 
the  theory  on  which  the  entire  framework  of 
the  federal  constitution  is  founded.  There  is 
in  it  no  trace,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  of  any  belief 
in  blind  forces,  nor  any  resemblance  to  mechan- 
[/  ics.  It  is  all  design  of  the  highest  kind,  and  de- 
sign resting  upon  just  that  knowledge  of  the 
usual  operation  of  human  motive  which  enables 
us  to  make  use  of  and  be  of  use  to  our  fellows 
in  every  other  direction,  and  the  final  mastery 
of  which  is  attributed  by  religion  to  God. 

The  means,  then,  by  which  responsibility  is 
secured  must  vary  with  time,  race,  and  circum- 
stances, but  is  always  through  some  motive  or 
motives  the  operation  of  which  is  so  uniform 
that  we  are  justified  in  assuming  it  to  be  con- 
stant. In  primitive  times  two  such  motives  are 
the  religious  bond  and  the  tie  of  blood,  and  it  is 
owing  to  the  strength  of  the  former  that  we  find 
oaths  so  uniformly  used  to  bind  the  conscience 
of  those  who  exercise  office;  the  very  fact  that 
the  King  was  the  Lord's  anointed  made  mal- 
feasance in  acting  for  him  a  kind  of  sacrilege. 


RESPONSIBILITY  63 

We  still  administer  an  oath  of  office,  but  in 
modern  times  we  have  lost  the  belief  that  this 
is  of  the  essence  of  the  matter,  and  allow  the 
incumbent,  if  he  has  conscientious  scruples 
against  an  oath,  to  make  an  affirmation — a  pro- 
ceeding which,  until  comparatively  recent  times, 
would  have  seemed  either  futile  or  wrong.  The 
tie  of  blood  which  runs  through  all  early  tribal 
government  had  a  force  that  we  know  nothing 
of.  In  tribal  government  the  sympathy  of 
kindred  blood,  even  when  it  was  a  pure  as- 
sumption, was  a  motive  which  could  be  safely 
appealed  to,  to  secure  responsibiHty. 

In  modern  communities  these  motives  have 
lost  their  primitive  strength,  and  may  be  said 
to  be  at  their  weakest  in  modern  democratic 
communities.  Accordingly,  in  the  self-govern- 
ment of  such  communities,  we  usually  see  a 
variety  of  motives  appealed  to  in  the  hope  that 
some  may  prove  efficacious.  But  these  always 
include  the  constant  motives  above  referred 
to,  i.  e.y  the  necessity  of  support;  the  desire  for 
power;  the  dread  of  "censure"  or  opinion, 
or  of  punishment;  and  the  love  of  approval, 
rank,  honor,  and  reward.  Without  abandon- 
ing the  oath  of  office,  which  is   still  admin- 


i/' 


64  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

istered  to  all  who  will  take  it,  we  add,  in  case 
of  many  offices,  a  pecuniary  bond,  the  penalty 
of  which  appeals  to  the  disHke  of  pecuniary 
loss;  we  assure  the  agent's  support,  during 
the  performance  of  the  duties  of  the  office,  by 
a  salary,  or  fees,  and  make  the  tenure  of  it  suf- 
ficiently long  at  least  to  induce  the  incumbent 
to  accept  it;  encourage  his  fideHty  with  the 
hope  of  advancement,  and  reward  it  with  pro- 
motion, and  often  in  old  age  and  disabihty  with 
a  pension,  and  in  the  case  of  failure  or  wrong- 
doing attach  the  penalties  of  summary  removal 
or  removal  by  impeachment  or  other  legal 
means.  For  the  religious  bond  and  that  of 
blood,  our  substitute  is  the  moral,  social,  and 
patriotic  bond,  which  is  in  some  cases,  and  at 
some  times,  weaker,  at  others  stronger,  but 
which  cannot  compare  in  constant  strength  with 
some  of  the  others  just  mentioned.  Socialists, 
it  may  be  observed,  do  not  agree  to  this.  They 
hold  that  responsibility  for  the  operation  of  the 
new  sort  of  government  they  propose,  whose 
main  function  will  be  to  correct  the  errors  intro- 
duced into  human  society  by  the  nature  of  man, 
can  be  secured  through  the  ordinary  operation 
of  moral,  social,  and  patriotic  motives;  that  is, 


RESPONSIBILITY  65 

through  what  is  called  sympathy.  One  objec- 
tion to  this  solution  of  the  matter,  as  already 
remarked,  is  that,  as  far  as  our  observation  and 
knowledge  goes,  antipathy  at  times  is  apt  to 
be  quite  as  powerful  a  force  as  sympathy. 

I  think,  therefore,  that  a  fair  statement  of  the 
case,  so  far  as  it  concerns  free  government,  is 
that  to  secure  responsibiUty  in  office  we  appeal 
to  all  the  motives  which  ^m  presumably  come 
to  our  aid,  but  primarily  to  hope  and  fear  of 
advantage  or  detriment  of  some  kind.  Among 
the  former  are  emoluments,  office,  promotion, 
pensions,  the  good  opinion  of  neighbors  and 
friends,  and,  in  exceptional  cases,  distinction  and 
fame;  among  the  latter  are  pecuniary  loss,  loss 
of  reputation,  disgrace,  and  deprivation  of  office. 
But  to  these  are  added  the  whole  force,  whatever 
it  may  be,  of  the  obligations  of  religion  and  mo- 
rality, of  nationality,  of  patriotism,  so  far  as  we 
can  make  use  of  them. 

I  have  said  very  little  about  economic  law, 
because  the  mere  mention  of  it  nowadays  seems 
to  excite  indignation;  but  people  who  are  act- 
ually engaged  in  government  always  have  it 
forced  upon  their  attention.  What  we  call  the 
greed  for  office  is  closely  connected  with  the 


66  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

one  great  economic  fact  which  can  never  be 
evaded — that  to  Hve,  man  must  eat.  Whatever 
other  motive  man  calls  in  to  aid  him  in  getting 
political  work  done,  the  most  authoritative 
writers,  no  less  than  the  common  experience  of 
mankind,  enforce  the  conclusion  that  means  of 
daily  support  sufficient  to  insure  the  continu- 
ance of  Hfe  cannot  be  overlooked. 

Responsibility  may  be  lodged,  in  theory,  in 
certain  hands,  in  fact,  in  other  hands.  The  per- 
son made  responsible  for  power  intrusted  to 
him  may  be  one  person,  or  responsibihty  may 
be  devolved  upon  a  few  persons,  or  upon  a  large 
number  of  persons,  and  vice  versa.  It  may  be 
of  different  species  or  varieties.  It  may  act 
through  different  motives.  Whether  or  no 
these  finally  all  come  under  the  heads  of  fear 
and  hope,  even  fear  and  hope  act  in  an  infinite 
number  of  different  ways.  In  the  most  primi- 
tive forms  of  government,  fear  of  life  and  limb 
is  the  motive  which  most  readily  suggests  it- 
self; this  fact  it  is  which  is  at  the  bottom  of 
Montesquieu's  generalization  that  the  principle 
of  despotism  is  fear.  PoHtical  responsibihty 
through  fear  of  death  is  always  highly  attrac- 
tive to  tyrants,  and  is  still  resorted  to  wherever 


RESPONSIBILITY  67 

the  traditions  of  tyranny  survive.  In  Russia 
to-day,  a  general  engaged  in  war  may  find  his 
life  staked  for  him  by  the  government  on  the 
result ;  a  hundred  years  ago  the  idea  of  death 
as  a  legitimate  and  usual  form  of  poHtical 
responsibiUty  was  by  no  means  unfamiHar. 
That  ordinary  official  responsibiUty  should  take 
this  form  is  to  us  a  grotesque  idea;  but  in 
France  during  the  Revolution  an  orator  is 
mentioned  by  Mr.  Lowell  as  having  made  a 
speech  in  favor  of  ministerial  responsibility,  of 
which  the  conclusion  was,  "and  by  responsi- 
biUty I  mean  death."  In  arbitrary  govern- 
ments failure  in  office  is  readily  confounded  with 
treason;  to  substitute  for  death  exile  and  con- 
fiscation is  an  act  of  leniency.  In  highly  civil- 
ized governments,  although  theoretically  pun- 
ishment by  deprivation  of  office  is  reUed  on  to 
enforce  the  responsibility  of  the  executive,  it  is 
rarely  resorted  to,  partly  because  it  is  cumbrous, 
and  partly  because  a  far  more  delicate  form  of 
responsibiUty  has  been  found  effective — that  of 
"censure."  The  desire  for  good-wiU  and  ap- 
proval often  combines  with  the  hope  of  contin- 
uance in  office. 
A  curious  feature  of  poUtical  responsibiUty 


68  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

is  that  it  continually  tends  to  shift  its  situs,  to 
disappear  in  one  place  and  reappear  in  another; 
and  this  is  a  necessary  consequence  of  the  fact 
that  in  any  community,  however  apparently 
stable  or  carefully  designed  the  government, 
new  centres  of  political  power  are  always  (in  the 
inevitable  process  of  social  change)  in  process 
of  development.  The  best-known  illustration 
of  this  is  found  in  England.  Down  to  compara- 
tively recent  times  English  ministers  were  re- 
sponsible to  the  Crown,  very  much  as  ministers 
are  to-day  in  Germany.  As  they  were  appointed 
by  the  Crown,  and  were  removable  by  the 
Crown,  there  seemed  no  alternative.  But  forty 
years  ago  it  was  pointed  out  by  Bagehot  that 
they  had  become  really  responsible  to  the  party 
majority  for  the  time  being  in  the  House  of 
Commons,  and  had  become  very  Hke  a  committee 
of  the  House  of  Commons.  The  responsibihty 
to  the  Crown  had  become  nominal,  and  the 
centre  of  power  had  changed.  Unsuspected  for 
a  long  time,  this  had  become  a  constitutional 
fact.  Down  to  1832,  owing  to  the  condition  of 
the  electorate,  the  House  of  Commons  was  a 
feeble  body  in  comparison  with  the  Crown,  but 
when  the  powerful  and  rich  middle  class  were 


RESPONSIBILITY  69 

admitted  to  the  suffrage  their  representatives 
encroached  upon  the  powers  of  the  Crown  by 
compelHng  the  ministry  to  become  answerable 
to  them.  But,  if  you  will  examine  Mr.  Lowell's 
interesting  study  of  the  whole  subject,  you  will 
see  that  a  further  change  seems  to  be  taking 
place  now,  by  which  ministers  are  becoming 
more  or  less  directly  responsible  to  the  electorate 
so  that  they  are  disposed  to  require  as  authority 
for  new  measures  a  democratic  mandate.  The 
principle  of  responsibility  remains;  if  they  fail, 
they  go  out  of  office. 

All  modern  writers  on  government  were  until 
recently  agreed  that  what  made  popular  govern- 
ment possible  in  the  large  free  states  of  the 
modern  world  was  the  principle  of  representa- 
tion; that  direct  democracy  over  enormous 
areas  was  impossible.  Representation  of  pop- 
ular bodies  is  based  on  responsibility.  "Re- 
sponsibility to  the  People"  is  its  essence.  But 
representation  is  only  a  form  of  delegation 
adapted  to  free  institutions;  the  delegation  of 
power  under  some  species  of  responsibihty  for 
its  exercise  is  as  old  as  the  world.  When  a  dis- 
trict elects  a  representative  to  Congress  for  two 
years,  it  does,  through  the  machinery  of  the 


70  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ballot,  something  which,  at  this  point,  resembles 
what  the  Emperor  of  Russia  does  when  he  sends 
an  agent  to  govern  a  province.  It  delegates 
power  to  be  executed  at  a  distance.  In  the  one 
case  power  is  delegated  by  a  single  person;  in 
the  other  by  an  electorate,  but  in  either  case  it 
is  a  delegation  of  power  to  be  used  at  a  distance 
by  an  agent  who  is  to  answer  for  what  he  has 
done.  There  is  a  further  difference — that  the 
representative  is  elected  for  a  definite  time — 
but  this  is  not  essential.  He  might  be  elected 
during  good  behavior,  and  the  contrivance  now 
introduced  for  getting  rid  of  representatives 
unsatisfactory  to  their  constituents,  called  the 
Recall,  is  a  popular  device  for  perfecting  re- 
sponsibility to  the  source  of  power.  To  the 
Emperor  it  is  not  a  device.  He  recalls  his  agent 
by  inherited  right. 

The  operation,  then,  of  the  representative 
system  is  founded  on  the  old  principle  of  dele- 
gation and  responsibility.  When  we  say  that 
a  member  of  Congress  is  responsible  to  his  con- 
stituents, we  mean  that  he  must  go  back  and  ac- 
count to  them  for  what  he  has  done,  in  which 
case  they  may  re-elect  him,  select  him  for  some 
higher  office,  or  pass  him  over. 


RESPONSIBILITY  71 

It  was  owing  to  our  theory  of  responsibility 
that  the  old  executive  right  of  "proroguing" 
the  legislature  was  abandoned  in  this  country. 
If  Congress  is  responsible  to  the  People,  the 
executive  would  usurp  their  prerogative  in  pro- 
roguing it.  A  popular  prorogation  could  only 
be  effected  by  a  vote  of  the  people  themselves 
and  for  other  reasons  was  not  thought  advis- 
able. The  recall  of  a  legislator  would  be  a  pro- 
rogation of  a  single  representative  by  his  electors; 
and  might  be  appHed  to  the  whole  body  at 
once,  in  which  case  it  would  be  a  prorogation  by 
the  People  instead  of  by  the  Crown. 

Perhaps  a  clearer  view  of  artificial  political 
responsibility  may  be  obtained  by  contrasting 
it  with  the  ancillary  system  which  is  always  at 
its  right  hand  in  every  civilized  government — 
that  of  legal  responsibility.  The  civil  and  crim- 
inal responsibihty  of  the  citizen  or  subject  in  a 
court  of  law  for  his  acts  and  omissions  rests 
upon  principles  analogous  to  the  responsibility 
in  the  poUtical  field  of  those  intrusted  with 
power  for  the  discharge  of  their  political  task. 
One  of  the  simplest  and  earhest  forms  of  legal 
responsibility  is  simple  punishment  for  crime, 
and  this  may  take  every  form  of  which  punish- 


72  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ment  is  capable;  the  cruelest  physical  tortures 
and  the  extreme  agony  inflicted  through  super- 
stitious terror  are  equally  utilized  by  primitive 
law.  At  the  other  extreme  we  have  in  our  age 
the  most  delicate  skill  and  enlightened  zeal  de- 
voted, not  to  punishment,  but  to  the  transfor- 
mation of  the  potential  criminal  into  what  we 
call  a  responsible  citizen,  a  process  the  most 
humane  known  to  civilization,  by  which  we  not 
merely  make  use  of,  but  actually  create,  respon- 
sibility in  the  mind  and  soul  of  man.  Civil  re- 
sponsibihty  before  the  law,  in  early  times,  tak- 
ing generally  the  crude  form  of  pecuniary  loss, 
advances  to  a  much  higher  level  in  combining 
with  this  the  prevention  of  wrong;  but  preven- 
tive justice  is  itself  based  on  a  summary  re- 
sponsibility to  the  courts — that  responsibility  of 
which  we  have  heard  so  much  of  late,  and 
without  which  the  administration  of  justice 
would  be  a  hollow  mockery.  It  is  through 
political  responsibility  that  this  legal  responsibil- 
ity is  made  possible.  The  political  agency  which 
makes  it  possible  is  courts  of  justice.  It  is  the 
courts  which  are  responsible  for  the  administra- 
tion of  justice,  and  whether  this  responsibility 
is  discharged  honestly  and  efficiently  depends 


RESPONSIBILITY  73 

entirely  on  the  means  taken  by  the  political 
head — king,  emperor,  parliament,  or  sovereign 
people — to  contrive  a  sound  system  of  judicial 
responsibility. 

Responsibility  in  office  is  merely  one  illustra- 
tion of  the  general  principle  of  responsibility 
extending  through  the  whole  body  poHtic,  and 
on  its  nature  and  operation  light  may  be  thrown 
from  almost  any  side.  One  of  the  best  and 
most  common  illustrations  is  that  afforded  by 
miHtary  discipHne.  Responsibility  here  means 
primitive  unquestioning  obedience.  As  already 
mentioned,  governments  have  been  from  the 
earHest  times  always  able  to  obtain  a  constant 
supply  of  troops  and  officers,  to  hold  them  abso- 
lutely accountable  for  disobedience  of  orders, 
partly  through  the  dread  of  punishment,  partly 
through  the  hope  of  reward,  partly  through  the 
mere  guarantee  of  the  means  of  subsistence. 
This  is  a  good  illustration  of  the  principle,  be- 
cause it  shows  at  the  same  time  the  foundation 
on  which  the  principle  rests,  the  extraordinary 
readiness  of  man  to  be  taught  and  trained  for 
use  by  the  state.  It  used  to  be  thought  that 
the  only  way  to  secure  a  constant  supply  of 
troops  was  to  pander  to  their  worst  passions. 


74  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

and  give  them  through  booty,  sack,  and  ransom 
the  means  of  gratifying  these.  The  maxim, 
*'The  soldier  must  have  his  reward,"  said  to 
have  been  Tilly's  answer  when  begged  for  some 
show  of  clemency  after  the  three  days'  sack  of 
Magdeburg,  has  been  in  our  time  abandoned;  a 
higher  and  more  humane  system  of  responsibil- 
ity has  been  established.  The  modern  officer's 
lot  is  in  the  main  very  dull  and  monotonous; 
he  and  the  soldiers  under  him  submit  to  drill 
and  drudgery,  which  to  a  civilian  seems  odious, 
with  the  readiness  of  a  policeman.  To  get  their 
task  performed  by  either,  we  cease  to  appeal  to 
base  motives  and  appetites,  and  get  the  work 
better  done. 

The  fire  service  is  even  a  still  more  remarkable 
instance.  Those  who  enlist  in  this  service  do  so 
for  scanty  pay,  and  the  ordinary  performance 
of  their  duty  involves  constant  exposure  to 
death,  and  possible  injuries  even  worse  than 
death.  But  paid  firemen  and  their  officers  are 
willing  to  assume  the  responsibility  for  what  in 
any  one  else  would  be  heroic  self-sacrifice  for 
slight  reward,  and  submit  to  a  rigorous  and 
almost  military  discipline.  In  this  case  the 
motive  among  others  appealed  to  seems  to  be 


RESPONSIBILITY  7. 

in  part  a  very  human  and  universal  one — the 
love  of  excitement;  and  in  part  a  very  noble 
one — the  desire  to  go  to  the  help  of  a  fellow- 
creature  in  distress  and  danger. 

Party  responsibility  is  a  quasi  corporate  re- 
sponsibility in  the  whole  party,  which  operates 
by  depriving  its  managers  of  power,  i.  e.^  office, 
when  they  no  longer  have  the  confidence  and 
support  of  the  electorate.  This  sort  of  respon- 
sibihty  has  played  a  most  important  part  in  the 
history  of  free  government,  as  it  is  a  direct  re- 
sponsibility to  the  electorate.  It  was  through 
party  responsibility  that  the  Federalists  were 
driven  out  by  the  Republicans,  and  the  Whigs 
by  the  Democrats,  and  these  in  turn  by  the 
present  RepubHcan  party.  At  present  we  often 
seem  to  be  living  in  a  country  in  which  there  is 
no  national  party  responsibiHty,  there  being 
only  one  party;  the  fact  is  constantly  deplored 
by  the  press  for  very  good  reason.  A  party 
is  a  political  combination  for  the  attainment  of 
definite  ends.  Unless  there  is  another  party 
with  a  reasonable  hope  of  persuading  the  elec- 
torate of  the  utility  of  an  opposed  policy,  the 
party  in  possession  may  remain  in  power  so 
long  as  to  make  it  difficult  for  it  ever  to  be  dis- 


76  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

lodged.  Even  under  the  Caesars  there  was  a  sort 
of  opposition,  but  it  was  not  the  opposition  of 
a  party;  the  party  in  power  had  ceased  to  be  re- 
sponsible because  it  could  not  be  turned  out. 
Any  one  who  wishes  to  see  what  happens  when, 
in  a  country  once  free,  there  is  no  longer  a  strug- 
gle between  two  parties  for  the  possession  of 
power,  should  read  Gaston  Boissier's  "I'Oppo- 
sition  sous  les  Cesars*';  the  author  had  seen  the 
same  thing  in  his  own  day;  having  been  a  sub- 
ject of  the  third  Napoleon. 

Without  taking  into  view  party  responsibility, 
what  is  meant  by  artificial  political  responsibil- 
ity is,  as  already  explained,  the  use  of  motive  in 
those  intrusted  with  power  to  do  the  will  of  the 
political  head,  so  as  to  make  them  answerable. 
To  provide  for  it  in  a  given  case,  it  is  necessary 
to  know  all  the  factors  in  the  problem.  It  does 
not  work,  any  more  than  any  other  political 
force,  in  a  moral  vacuum.  The  great  difficulty 
which  all  governments  have  had  in  dealing  suc- 
cessfully with  corporations  is  a  by-word.  Cor- 
porations are  not  office-holders,  but  creatures 
of  the  state;  they  are  vested  by  the  state  with 
a  part  of  its  power  for  certain  ends.  A  railroad 
or  an  industrial  corporation  is  not  very  Hke  a 


RESPONSIBILITY  77 

church,  but  its  power  has  the  same  potentiality 
of  growth;  and  consequently  the  state  makes  it 
responsible  in  a  variety  of  ways;  it  may  for- 
feit its  charter,  its  officers  may  be  fined  and  im- 
prisoned; its  discharge  of  its  functions  may  be 
supervised  by  the  state;  it  may  be  broken  up 
into  smaller  corporations;  in  addition  to  all 
this,  there  is  the  ordinary  legal  responsibility 
for  damage  and  wrong.  The  path  of  history  is 
strewn  with  wrecks  of  such  bodies  which,  in 
their  struggle  to  become  unaccountable,  have 
been  destroyed  by  the  state.  Combinations  of 
a  dangerous  character  may  not  be  corporations 
at  all;  whatever  form  they  take,  the  struggle 
is,  on  the  one  hand,  to  assert  a  supremacy  above 
the  state;  on  the  other,  to  estabHsh  some  sort 
of  responsibility.  A  curious  instance  in  our  own 
time  is  the  struggle  between  the  state  and  the 
trade  unions.  The  essence  of  these  unions  is 
that  they  are  unincorporated.  Their  members 
are  under  a  theoretic  responsibility,  for  instance, 
to  the  sheriff  and  his  posse;  this  is,  however, 
in  this  country,  often  of  Httle  value,  as  the  body 
of  citizens  may  easily  sympathize  with  the  ad- 
herents of  the  union.  The  result  was  at  first 
a  system  of  violence  and  intimidation  by  means 


78  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

of  which  unions  were  able  to  terrorize  whole 
counties  and  states  and  intimidate  those  out  of 
work  from  taking  the  employment  given  up  by 
their  fellow-workmen. 

Thirty,  and  even  twenty,  years  ago  the  labor 
problem  was  in  great  measure  a  problem  of  ir- 
responsible violence,  which  produced  temporary 
anarchy  at  one  time  in  Pennsylvania  and  at 
another  in  Illinois.  Strikes  produced  it,  but  no 
one  seemed  responsible  for  it.  Irresponsibility 
enabled  the  violent  among  the  strikers  to  maim, 
beat,  and  frighten  their  reluctant  and  peaceable 
fellows  away  from  their  work.  What  solved  the 
difficulty  was  an  application  by  the  courts  to 
those  disputes  of  a  principle  of  responsibility 
which  made  violence  impossible.  The  injunction 
was  not  a  new  remedy,  but  it  had  seldom  or 
never  been  applied  before  in  this  class  of  cases. 
But  when  sympathy  with  strikes  paralyzed  the 
local  executive,  responsibility  of  this  other  sort 
was  imposed  by  the  courts  by  the  means  of  pre- 
ventive justice.  The  practice  struck  people  as 
novel  and  surprising  because  it  was  applied  on 
a  great  scale,  but  the  method  of  prevention,  as 
a  means  of  anticipating  violence  and  irreparable 
injury,  was  centuries  old.    The  novelty  lay  in 


RESPONSIBILITY  79 

the  circumstances.  The  rage  and  fury  produced 
by  "government  by  injunction"  was  exactly 
measured  by  the  binding  force  of  the  responsi- 
biHty  fastened  upon  those  contemplating  in- 
timidation and  violence.  This  responsibihty 
was  responsibility  to  the  courts,  and  it  was  en- 
forced, as  it  always  has  been,  by  summary 
arrests,  fine,  and  imprisonment  for  contempt  of 
process.  In  this  way  for  some  years  now  the 
courts  have  enforced  a  responsibility  which  could 
not  be  enforced  in  any  other  way,  and  compara- 
tive order  has  reigned  in  strikes,  and  boycotting 
and  picketing  have  been  stopped,  where  formerly 
for  the  time  being  the  mob  seemed  destined  to 
have  undisputed  sway.  The  unanimous  deci- 
sion of  the  Supreme  Court  in  the  Debs  case  is 
the  landmark  in  this  chapter  of  the  great  strug- 
gle between  labor  and  capital,  and  if  to-day  we 
listen  with  equanimity  to  the  perpetually  re- 
curring threats  of  violence  which  accompany 
every  strike,  it  is  because  the  courts  have  found 
a  way  through  the  writ  of  injunction  of  paralyz- 
ing violence  and  outrage,  and  preserving  order. 
Take  away  the  power  to  enjoin  and  to  make 
decrees  respected  and  you  will  return  at  once 
to  the  state  of  affairs  which  prevailed  during  the 


So  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Pittsburgh  riots  and  the  anarchy  in  Chicago. 
Responsibility  of  this  kind  leaders  who  gain  in 
power  through  irresponsibiHty  do  not  like. 
Messrs.  Gompers,  Morrison,  and  Mitchell  resent 
responsibility  here  just  as,  in  another  field,  the 
Emperor  of  Germany  resents  it.  They  prefer 
arbitrary  power.  The  courts  have  in  this  case 
come  to  the  rescue  of  the  weakness  of  the 
executive  and  legislature.  The  sort  of  respon- 
sibility which  was  obviously  needed  was  the 
responsibihty  of  a  corporation.  If  the  legisla- 
ture had  compelled  the  unions  to  incorporate 
themselves — if  they  were  to  do  so  to-morrow 
— the  treasurer  and  officers  and  funds  of  the 
union  would  be  held  legally  responsible,  and 
injunctions  and  judgments  would  shock  no  one. 
Paralyze  this  power  to  prevent  violence  and 
damage  to  property  and  business  and  you 
would  at  once  restore  the  irresponsibility  from 
which  the  injunctions  have  saved  us.  Perceiv- 
ing this,  those  who  dislike  injunctions  more 
than  they  do  violence  have  resorted  to  the 
ingenious  proposal  that  punishment  of  violation 
of  injunctions  shall  be  by  jury  trial,  a  mode  of 
enforcing  judicial  decrees  never  before  resorted 
to  because  it  interposes  a  delay  through  which 


RESPONSIBILITY  8i 

the  mob,  the  conductor  of  the  boycott,  or  the 
picket  may  accomphsh  its  object  while  the 
right  of  the  court  to  prevent  it  is  being  argued. 
The  whole  history  of  these  labor  injunctions  is 
the  history  of  an  attempt  on  the  part  of  a  class 
to  exempt  itself  from  ordinary  responsibihty  to 
law  and  the  community,  and  of  the  successful 
adaptation  by  the  legal  branch  of  government 
of  a  means  of  enforcing  the  same  responsibility.^ 
The  principle  of  responsibility,  then,  pervades 
not  only  the  whole  body  poUtic,  but  all  human 
affairs,  private  as  well  as  pubHc.  It  is  that  with- 
out which  no  club  can  be  managed,  no  ship 
sailed,  no  company  drilled,  no  family  be  kept 
together,  no  church  maintain  an  organization, 
and  finally  no  state  exist.  It  inheres  in  the 
structure  and  framework  of  the  government  of 
a  state;  and  there  it  is  used  as  the  means  by 
which  those  who  enjoy  the  power  of  the  state 
and  are  vested  with  its  sovereignty,  distribute 
this  power  among  their  agents,  judicial,  legisla- 
tive, and  executive,  and  artificially  secure  the 

1  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  dwell  upon  the  point  that  the  result 
— the  establishment  of  the  injunction  as  an  ordinary  remedy 
in  labor  disputes — is  a  highly  beneficial  result  for  labor;  for  the 
alternative  is  always  anarchy,  in  which  both  sides  employ  force, 
and  the  more  powerful,  that  is  the  better  organized,  the  more 
skilful,  and  the  richer,  carries  the  day. 


82  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

performance  of  their  duties.  This  artificial  po- 
Htical  responsibihty  is  totally  different  from 
custom  and  habit;  though  it  may  make  use  of 
them,  there  is  no  reason  why  it  should  be  con- 
founded with  them. 

The  operation  of  responsibility  on  human  be- 
ings can  best  be  understood  by  looking  into 
what  happens  when  it  is  wholly  removed.  Le 
Bon,  in  his  examination  of  the  "Psychology  of 
Crowds,'*  writes,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  under 
the  influence  of  the  error  to  which  all  writers 
on  these  subjects  are  continually  exposed,  of 
treating  a  crowd  not  as  a  general  term  for  a 
gathering  of  individual  human  beings,  but  as  a 
human  being  itself;  he  personifies  a  crowd.  Of 
the  truth  of  the  facts  which  he  observes  about 
it,  however,  there  is  no  doubt,  and  the  first 
of  these  is  that,  as  compared  with  the  individuals 
who  compose  it,  it  is  destitute  of  responsibility; 
it  easily  becomes  a  mob  and  then  acts  like  a 
wild  beast,  and  will  murder,  plunder,  and  burn 
when  the  persons  who  compose  it  would  ordi- 
narily do  none  of  these  things.  But  he  gives  no 
explanation  of  these  curious  facts,  which  have 
been  recognized  for  centuries,  though  not  be- 
fore, perhaps,  so  clearly  put.    The  reason  is  fur- 


RESPONSIBILITY  83 

nished  by  the  fact  that  its  numbers  take  away 
or  greatly  diminish  the  force  of  the  motives 
which  lead  individuals  to  behave,  as  we  say,  in 
a  responsible  manner.  Not  only  is  the  burning, 
murdering,  and  plundering  done  collectively,  so 
that  each  one  can  say  "My  part  in  it  is  very 
sHght"  and  "Had  I  not  been  there  the  result 
would  have  been  the  same";  but  where  a  thou- 
sand persons  take  part  in  an  outrage  the  or- 
dinary legal  responsibility  is  wanting.  Since 
they  can  hardly  all  be  punished,  the  probability 
is  that  no  one  will  be;  hence  all  the  inhibitive 
forces  which  make  man  a  responsible  agent  are 
impaired,  and  the  collective  impulse  to  do  what- 
ever is  suggested  greatly  inflamed.  Even  the 
ordinary  risk  of  censure — the  fear  of  the  loss  of 
the  good  opinion  of  neighbors — is  hardly  of  any 
effect,  because  the  mob  is  made  up  of  many  neigh- 
bors. When  the  sympathies  of  the  dominant 
portion  of  the  community  are  on  the  side  of  the 
violence  or  outrage,  responsibility  or  the  risk 
of  being  held  accountable  in  the  forum  of  either 
law  or  morals  is  practically  non-existent,  and  it 
is  on  this  account  that  history  is  full  of  religious 
and  race  massacres,  and  lynchings  such  as  we 
tolerate.    The  horrors  of  a  mutiny  on  shipboard 


84  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

come  from  the  sudden  removal  of  individual  re- 
sponsibility. Make  the  crowd  a  holiday  pro- 
cession, escorted  by  a  few  policemen,  and  it 
behaves  Hke  an  ordinary  responsible  individual; 
each  member  of  it  is  still  actually  answerable 
morally,  socially,  and  legally.  Let  this  same 
procession  meet  another  against  which  it  has 
a  race  or  a  religious  passion  and  the  police- 
men be  partisans  on  both  sides:  responsibiHty 
vanishes,  and  the  very  same  individuals  who 
were  before  peaceable  and  quiet  become  riotous 
and  even  murderous.  The  ancients  understood 
this,  but  they  did  not  well  understand  its  cause. 
Hamilton  put  it  in  an  epigram  by  saying  that 
if  every  Athenian  had  been  a  Socrates,  the 
Athenian  Assembly  would  still  have  been  a 
mob. 


LECTURE  III 
THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

So  far  as  we  have  gone,  I  believe  all  the  great 
modern  writers  on  the  actual  operation  of  gov- 
ernment support  the  principle  of  responsibiUty 
by  impHcation  at  least.  But  there  has  been  the 
widest  diversity  as  to  its  true  application. 

This  diversity,  I  think,  has  come  in  great  part 
from  an  intellectual  tendency  which  is  the  curse 
of  all  true  inquiry  into  practical  matters.  When 
responsibility  to  the  people  was  first  heard  of 
as  a  cardinal__gTiriciple  of  government,  it  was  — 
introduced,  as  explained  by  Mill,  to  answer  the  *- 
questions :  How  shall  abuses  of  authority  be  pre- 
vented ?  How  shall  we  make  it  certain  that  the 
greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number,  or 
the  general  welfare,  shall  be  steadily  kept  in 
view  by  those  who  are  intrusted  with  the  work 
of  government?  There  is  only  one  way — by  — 
making  them  responsible  to  the  body  whose  in- 
terest is  at  all  times  the  interest  of  the  whole 
community,  i.  e.,  the  body  of  the  community 
itself.     It  followed  from  this  that  to  insure  re- 

87 


88  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

sponsibility  in  the  government,  its  agents  must 
be  responsible  to  the  people.  The  electorate  must 
be  sufficiently  large  to  secure  this.  The  political 
philosophy  of  Bentham  and  of  the  democracy 
of  Jefferson  may  all  be  summed  up  in  this.  The 
universal  suffrage  of  to-day  is  only  an  applica- 
tion of  it.  It  is  all  founded  on  a  theory  of  re- 
sponsibihty,  sound  enough  in  itself,  but  hitherto 
used,  if  I  am  not  much  mistaken,  in  an  erroneous 
way  by  its  most  enthusiastic  supporters. 

Speculation  is  always  ready  to  stop  at  a  gen- 
eral term  or  phrase  and  misuse  the  idea  under- 
lying it.  Responsibility  to  the  body  of  the  peo- 
ple through  the  ballot  is  a  general  conception  or 
term  Hke  liberty  or  equality.  But  it  immedi- 
ately became  in  the  minds  of  the  early  advocates 
of  democracy  in  this  country  something  quite 
different;  and  if  the  fantastic  speculations  of 
Mr.  Bryan  about  it  to-day  puzzle  and  amaze  us, 
it  must  be  said  in  his  defence  that  he  has  done  lit- 
tle more  than  caricature  the  speculations  on  this 
subject  of  an  earlier  day.  Those  who  kept  their 
heads  when  this  shibboleth  of  democracy  first 
came  into  vogue  were  the  Federalists,  and  it  is 
well  known  that  they  thought  their  opponents 
crazy,  or  nearly  so. 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  89 

The  JefFersonian  method  of  employing  re- 
sponsibility we  know  all  about,  for  it  has  been 
gradually  developed  for  a  hundred  years  and  is 
now  flourishing  in  great  perfection.  It  may  be 
summed  up  in  this  way:  All  abuses  of  power  are 
cured  by  making  him  who  has  the  power  respon- 
sible to  the  people,  i.  e.,  to  a  popular  vote.  This 
is  because  responsibility  means  always  respon- 
sibility through  the  ballot.  As  every  official 
tends  to  enlarge  his  own  powers,  he  must  be 
made  elective  and,  to  prevent  his  enlarging 
them,  responsibihty  through  elections  must  be 
made  as  frequent  as  possible.  The  president  or 
governor  must  have  a  short  term.  Legislatures 
must  be  annual,  because  "when  annual  elections 
end,  tyranny  begins";  judges  must  be  made 
elective  officers  for  comparatively  short  terms; 
a  long  term  weakens  responsibility  and  will  make 
even  a  judge  a  tyrant.^  The  idea  is  one  of  uni- 
versal application.  If  you  wish  a  really  good 
government,  you  must  make  the  term  of  every 
official — selectman,  hog-reeve,  tree-warden,  gov- 
ernor, and  all — one  year.  Then,  if  the  people 
are  satisfied,  they  can  give  him  another,  but  he 

» In  Oklahoma  a  Supreme  Court  judge  holds  office  for  eight 
years. 


go  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

must  be  answerable  at  the  end  of  one  year 
through  the  ballot  to  the  body  which  is  the 
enemy  of  tyrants.  Why  a  year  was  taken,  why 
a  month  or  a  week  was  not  thought  well  of  for 
so'me  offices,  is  not  clear.  Nor  was  the  theory 
ever  applied  in  its  full  perfection  to  the  judici- 
ary; for  continuity's  sake  in  the  administration 
of  justice  judges  must  remain  on  the  bench  a  few 
years.  In  New  York  the  theorists  went  as  far 
as  they  dared  in  making  the  judiciary  elective 
for  a  comparatively  short  term,  and  they  were 
followed  generally.  In  Massachusetts,  and  a 
few  other  States,  the  old  judicial  tenure  was 
saved;  throughout  the  rest  of  the  body  politic 
the  panacea  of  annual  elections  was  thoroughly 
applied. 

The  difficulty  with  the  whole  system  was  that, 
while  founded  on  a  perfectly  correct  idea,  the 
deductions  were  from  the  idea  and  not  from  the 
facts  of  life  from  which  the  conception  was  gen- 
eralized. Apply  analysis  to  responsibility  in  the 
actual  operation  of  government,  and  it  appears 
clear  that  responsibility  means  answerability  by 
some  one  to  some  one,  for  something,  by  certain 
means.  If  the  means  proposed  are  a  popular 
annual  election,  before  knowing  whether  these 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  91 

means  can  be  successfully  resorted  to  to  make, 
let  us  say,  a  judge  accountable  to  the  commu- 
nity for  the  discharge  of  his  duties,  we  must  ask 
what  the  duties  are,  what  the  tenure  required 
for  their  performance  is,  how  he  will  get  his 
nomination,  whether  the  body  of  voters  can 
judge  of  his  performance  of  his  duties,  etc.,  etc. 
If  the  question  is  as  to  a  legislator,  the  answer 
will  not  necessarily  be  the  same;  still  less  if  it  is 
as  to  a  governor  or  sheriff.  la  other  words,  the 
way  to  make  a  public  servant  really  responsible  , 
must  depend,  not  on  making  his  office  elective  ^ 
and  for  a  short  term,  but  on  all  the  circumstances 
of  the  case.  Universal  suffrage  may  provide 
the  means;  again  it  may  not.  I  have  ventured 
to  call  the  opposite  view,  that  responsibiHty 
is  to  be  secured  by  popular  election  at  short  in- 
tervals, the  democratic  mjstake.  I  might,  with- 
out danger  of  extravagance,  have  called  it  the 
democratic  delusion. 

The  first  question  in  the  contrived  structure 
of  any  government  is  how  to  make  use  of  the 
principle  of  political  responsibility  so  as  to  get 
the  work  of  government  effectively  done.  When 
the  community  is  small  and  the  sovereign  powers 
are  concentrated  in  the  hands  of  one  person,  the 


V 


92  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

solution  seems  comparatively  easy.  Is  a  tax 
necessary?  He  has  it  collected.  Is  a  war  to  be 
carried  on?  He  raises  the  army  and  heads  it. 
Is  justice  to  be  administered?  He  does  it  him- 
self or  appoints  judges  to  do  it.  All  the  powers 
of  the  state  are  vested  in  him;  all  agents  are 
responsible  to  him  because  they  are  removable 
at  will  by  him.  But  in  a  modern  popular  gov- 
ernment, where  the  powers  of  the  state  are 
vested  in  a  vast  number  of  people,  the  problem 
is  quite  a  different  one.  The  community,  or  the 
electorate  within  it,  can  practically  do  nothing 
but  vote,  i.  e.y  select  for  office  this  or  that  man, 
and  decide  negatively  or  affirmatively  on  this 
or  that  legal  or  constitutional  provision.  Their 
highest  function  is  to  adopt  or  reject  a  constitu- 
tion. As  we  have  seen,  since  primitive  sover- 
eignty was  generally  personal  when  popular 
government  was  introduced  in  modern  states, 
it  was  inevitable  that  the  principle  of  responsi- 
bility to  the  new  sovereign  through  a  direct  vote 
should  have  been  adopted  as  the  foundation  of 
popular  government.  There  was  no  doubt  in 
any  one's  mind — even  in  minds  as  opposite  as 
those  of  Jefferson  and  Bentham — that  the  only 
means  of  preventing  abuses  of  power  and  secur- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  93 

ing  the  welfare  of  the  community  was  through 
responsibility  to  the  community;  the  corollary, 
that  the  most  effective  way  of  enforcing  this  re- 
sponsibility was  through  sending  representatives 
to  prevent  and  do  away  with  abuses,  and  keep- 
ing those  representatives  responsible  through 
elections,  seemed  to  follow  naturally.  This,  as 
has  already  been  said,  is  the  view  of  responsi- 
bility put  forward  by  the  democratic  writers  of 
a  century  ago.  Their  heirs,  however,  proceeded 
to  develop  the  idea  in  a  novel  way;  not  content 
with  the  logical  step  of  widening  the  basis  of 
sovereign  power,  then  in  the  hands  of  property 
owners,  by  introducing  universal  suffrage,  they 
proceeded  to  secure  responsibility  by  introduc- 
ing the  elective  principle  into  all  offices  of  gov- 
ernment wherever  practicable,  and,  to  make 
doubly  sure,  by  making  the  tenure  as  short  as 
possible. 

Not  content  even  with  this,  they  went  farther, 
and,  as  often  happens,  they  wrenched  a  mis- 
understood principle  from  its  original  purpose 
and  misappHed  it  in  a  new  field.  If  when  annual 
elections  ended  tyranny  began,  there  was  not  only 
a  connection  between  short  elective  terms  and 
responsibility,  but  the  cure  for  the  old  difficulty, 


94  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

that  any  official  who  stayed  in  office  tended  to 
become  despotic,  was  simple.  Short  terms  were 
just  as  good  for  executive  clerks  as  for  legislators; 
in  other  words,  as  the  key  to  good  legislation 
was  annual  election,  so  the  key  to  good  ad mm- 
istration  in  the  clerical  and  administrative  ser- 
vice, where  the  tenure  was  by  appointment,  was 
rotation  in  office.  In  another  generation,  rota- 
tion in  office  had  substituted  for  true  political 
responsibility  that  baleful  species  of  answera- 
bility which  means  nothing  but  favor  and  pat- 
ronage, and  was  now  stoutly  defended  as  an 
essential  principle  in  a  democratic  state. 

At  this  point,  having  stated  what  I  believe 
the  democratic  mistake  to  be,  it  seems  best,  for 
the  sake  of  clearness,  to  state  more  expHcitly 
what  I  believe  to  be  the  true — and  opposed — 
theory.  I  believe  that  the  only  effective  method 
of  securing  responsibility  to  the  people  (by  which 
is  meant  in  most  cases  the  faithful  and  efficient 
discharge  of  official  duty  as  prescribed  by  law) 
is  secure  tenure  (involving  necessarily  infrequent 
elections),  and  that  the  responsibility  actually 
secured  by  the  system  of  frequent  elections  and 
consequent  insecure  tenure  is  responsibility  less 
to  the  people  than  to  an  arbitrary  and  irrespon- 


ij 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  95 

sible  private  employer  or  employers,  at  the  head 
of  what  is  known  as  the  Machine;  that  through 
it  the  boss  or  bosses  of  the  machine  become  the 
real  master  or  masters  of  the  so-called  servant 
of  the  state,  clinching  his  allegiance  by  means  of 
the  salary  of  an  office  controlled  through  the 
party  nomination  and  party  vote,  and  exacting 
in  return  for  such  security  impHcit  obedience, 
not  to  the  state  but  to  themselves. 

This  view  of  the  subject  is  founded  on  a  very 
simple  fact — the  close  resemblance  between  pub- 
lic and  private  business.  It  is  at  this  point  that 
the  analogy  between  Man  and  the  State  is  most 
plain.  How  is  responsibility  to  the  owners  for 
the  management  of  a  private  business  secured  ? 
As  to  all  those  who  do  the  actual  work,  by  mak- 
ing a  faithful  discharge  of  the  duty  of  the  par- 
ticular office — treasurer,  secretary,  head  of  de- 
partment— mean  a  tenure  during  good  behavior, 
promotion,  often  provision  for  old  age,  and  se- 
curity against  arbitrary  removal,  except  so  far  as  \ 
change  of  circumstances  makes  this  impossible. 
In  every  private  business,  so  far  as  well  man- 
aged, this  has  for  untold  ages  been  the  system; 
and  moreover  it  is  the  only  system  known  to 
man  by  which  fidelity  to  the  ends  of  the  busi- 


K 


1/ 


g6  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ness,  that  is,  responsibility,  is  secured.  Nobody 
in  private  business  ever  dreams  of  securing  it  in 
any  other  way,  and  any  one  who  should  propose 
to  secure  it  by  any  other  means  would  not  be 
listened  to. 

Now,  there  is  no  difference  between  the  or- 
dinary every-day  business  of  the  government, 
whether  monarchy,  aristocracy,  or  democracy, 
and  a  private  business  in  this  respect.  The  end 
in  view  is  public,  but  the  function  itself  is  not 
on  that  account  of  a  different  nature.  An  officer 
of  customs  or  tax-collector  collects  a  tax;  a  rail- 
road conductor  collects  fares;  a  freight  agent, 
freight;  the  bookkeeper  of  a  merchant,  bills;  but 
the  function  is  the  same — that  of  collecting 
money  for  his  principal.  A  postmaster  dis- 
tributes the  mail;  an  express  company's  agent 
distributes  parcels.  The  character  of  the  work 
is  not  different  in  the  two  cases.  Intelligence  is 
transmitted  by  telegraph  or  telephone.  In  one 
country  it  is  a  private  function;  in  another  it  is 
a  function  of  government.  Here  the  thing  done 
is  precisely  the  same.  Are  the  means  of  securing 
fidelity  to  the  company  in  one  case,  to  the  sover- 
eign in  the  other,  to  be  different? 

It  is  very  true  that  when  we  come  to  the 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  97 

managers  of  the  business,  the  directors  of  a  rail- 
way or  bank,  or  any  other  business  too  large 
and  varied  to  be  managed  except  by  a  large  body 
of  men,  the  elective  principle  is  applied,  but  it 
is  appHed  here  for  exactly  the  same  reason  that 
it  is  applied  in  public  affairs,  and  on  exactly 
the  principle  laid  down  by  Bentham — that  the 
general  welfare  of  the  business  may  be  watched 
and  guarded  by  the  only  class  which  can  he  relied 
upon  not  to  have  interests  opposed  to  this  general 
welfare — i.  e.,  owners  or  stockholders. 

And  so  in  public  affairs,  responsibility  to  the 
people  must  be  secured — in  the  case  of  the  legis- 
lature, in  the  case  of  constitutional  conventions, 
in  the  case  of  constitutional  amendments,  by 
some  sort  of  a  vote,  representative  or  direct; 
but  this  does  not  relate  to  the  transaction  of 
or3inary  public  business,  but  to  the  determina- 
tion of  public  policy,  to  changes  in  it,  to  modifi- 
cations in  the  sphere  of  government,  etc.  In 
any  discussion  of  government  by  design,  this  is 
the  line  which  separates  the  questions  which 
must  be,  and  those  which  cannot  be,  success- 
fully determined  by  suffrage,  I  shall  go  into 
this  from  another  point  of  view  in  another 
lecture. 


98  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Fortunately  for  us,  the  structure  and  frame- 
work of  the  federal  government  had  been  de- 
vised mainly  under  the  influence  of  a  true 
theory  of  responsibility,  and  the  success  which 
upon  the  whole  has  attended  the  work  is  due  to 
this.  It  may  be  worth  while  to  stop  here,  before 
considering  the  point  further,  and  glance  at  the 
scheme  of  the  federal  constitution,  the  great 
exemplar  of  modern  written  constitutions  in  the 
Enghsh-speaking  world. 

The  Federalist  is  sometimes  thoughtlessly 
treated  as  an  argument  by  pronounced  partisans 
in  favor  of  a  party  measure.  But  it  is  in  fact 
throughout  occupied  with  discussing  the  con- 
formity of  the  proposed  constitution  to  true 
republican  principles,  as  appHcable  to  the  Amer- 
ican community  of  that  day  for  the  purpose  of 
forming  a  new  government;  and  it  is  here  that 
we  have  brought  into  view  that  theory  of  the 
operation  of  government  through  human  mo- 
tive which,  as  I  believe,  must  furnish,  and  has 
always  furnished,  the  basis  of  all  successful  gov- 
ernment. The  reason  why  it  becomes  so  much 
plainer  in  the  federal  than  in  the  state  consti- 
tutions is  that  the  former  is  not,  like  them,  in 
part  an  historical  growth,  but  came  into  being 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  99 

a  perfected  contrivance,  in  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion then  supposed  to  be  unsolved:  Are  human 
beings  capable  of  establishing  good  government 
by  reflection  and  choice  ?  The  framers  also  were 
exempted  from  the  discussion  of  that  most  diffi- 
cult of  all  questions — the  abstract  sphere  and 
province  of  government.  For  them  the  sphere 
of  government  was  merely  such  powers  as  were 
required  from  the  States  to  enable  them  to  form 
an  energetic  and  stable  federal  government, 
while  the  great  mass  of  sovereignty  was  left 
where  they  found  it — in  the  States  themselves. 
Much  has  been  said  of  recent  years  about  the 
very  slight  prevision  which  the  framers  of  the 
constitution  had  of  the  vast  changes  that  were 
to  transform  the  fabric  of  social  existence  in  the 
United  States;  and  it  seems  to  be  thought  in  a 
good  many  quarters  that  their  scheme  has 
broken  down.  The  most  favorable  view  gen- 
erally expressed  is  that  wonders  were  done  con- 
sidering how  little  they  had  to  go  by  in  the  way 
of  experience.  The  best  way  to  gauge  their  work 
I  have  found  to  be  to  take  the  constitution  as 
they  left  it,  compare  their  scheme  as  far  as  pos- 
sible with  the  actual  result,  and  thus  judge  of 
their  theory. 


loo         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

To  give  a  very  brief  survey,  half  of  the  Feder^- 
alisi  is  taken  up  with  showing  that  to  have  vigor 
enough  to  maintain  itself  the  new  constitution 
must  be  a  government  acting  directly  upon  the 
individual  citizen,  and  that  a  federation  of 
States  such  as  had  hitherto  existed  would  not 
answer.  To  analyze  this  into  terms  of  responsi- 
bility, the  first  necessity  of  every  government 
is  means  of  defence.  The  States  had  hitherto 
been  bound  to  furnish  men  and  money,  but  they 
were  not  politically  or  legally  responsible  for 
not  doing  it.  Except  through  violence  or  war, 
they  could  not  as  agents  of  the  confederation  be 
made  to  do  it.  There  was  an  obligation,  but 
they  were  not  answerable  under  the  older  con- 
stitution for  the  discharge  of  it.  The  remedy 
E^as  to  clothe  the  citizen  directly  with  the  legal 
esponsibility  to  the  central  government  in  these 
espects.  Had  this  view  not  prevailed,  had  not 
the  Union  as  we  know  it  been  established,  the 
right  of  secession  must  have  existed.  This 
change,  which  introduced  the  ordinar}'  respon- 
sibility before  the  law,  instead  of  the  irrespon- 
sibility of  sovereign  states,  was  what  furnished 
the  legal  basis  for  the  appeal  to  save  the  Union 
two   generations   later.     The   Federalist  never 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MlSTAKIE' "  '    i'oi  ' 

became  in  the  days  of  Calhoun  and  his  followers 
a  book  of  authority  in  the  South.  What  the 
authors  say  about  the  irresponsible  character  of 
the  old  confederacy  and  the  impotence  of  the 
old  central  governnient  in  the  face  of  State  rights 
makes  the  explanation  of  this  very  simple.  The 
device  resorted  to  made  federated  States  respon- 
sible to  the  People  of  the  new  Republic, 

The  rest  of  the  Federalist  is  mainly  occupied 
with  an  explanation  of  the  means  taken  by  the 
framers  of  the  constitution  to  make  effective  the 
responsibility  of  the  Legislature,  the  Executive, 
and  the  Judiciary  of  the  new  government  for  the 
functions  which  they  were  to  discharge,  partly 
through  the  separation  of  the  powers  which  is 
designed  to  prevent  the  usurpation  of  the  func- 
tions of  one  department  by  another,  and  partly 
through  either  election  or  appointment.  Here 
again,  although  the  distinction  is  not  made  in 
so  many  words,  a  sharp  line  is  drawn  between 
those  cases  in  which  responsibility  is  necessarily 
secured  through  election,  i.  e.y  where  there  is  no  \ 
other  way,  and  those  in  which  it  is  only  naturally  \ 
and  effectively  secured  by  other  means.  There 
is  no  way  under  popular  government  of  provid- 
ing a  legislature  for  a  large  community,  except 


I02         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

through  representation,  which  means  election  of 
some  sort.  There  is  no  way  of  providing  an  ex- 
ecutive, independent  of  the  legislature,  except 
through  popular  election.  It  was  accordingly 
provided  that  the  House  of  Representatives 
should  be  made  up  of  representatives  directly 
elected  by  the  people;  to  balance  its  power,  the 
Senate  was  to  be  made  up  of  representatives  of 
the  States.  But  when  the  framers  of  the  Con- 
stitution came  to  the  judicial  power,  they  made 
the  office  appointive,  and  the  tenure  for  life, 
unless  terminated  by  a  proceeding  in  itself 
judicial.  As  to  the  executive,  they  made  one 
mistake,  which  was  a  natural  one — that  of  not 
foreseeing  that  an  electoral  college,  meeting  by 
States,  would  degenerate  into  a  body  of  political 
dummies.  That  mistake  arose  from  a  simple 
cause:  they  had  not  the  means  of  foreseeing  a 
fact  tolerably  familiar  to  us,  that  whenever  you 
lodge  the  nominating  power  in  an  elective  body, 
whether  a  convention,  a  legislature,  or  a  college 
got  together  ad  hoc,  you  merely  tend  to  throw 
the  actual  source  of  nomination  into  the  grasp  of 
the  constituents  of  the  elective  body.  This  mis- 
take has  had,  however,  less  influence  than  might 
have  been  expected.     In  the  main,  the  Presi- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE  103 

dents  of  the  United  States  have  been  represen- 
tative men,  and  there  have  been  among  them, 
to  say  the  least,  in  proportion  to  the  whole  num- 
ber and  duration  of  tenure,  as  many  men  of 
conspicuous  abihty  and  distinction  and  as  few 
distinctly  mischievous  rulers  as  any  other  gov- 
ernment can  show.  Generally  they  have  been 
responsible;  that  is,  they  have  discharged  the 
duties  of  their  office  in  the  way  intended  by  the 
Constitution,  and,  when  they  have  not  done  so, 
their  responsibility  has  been  enforced  by  the 
means  provided  in  the  Constitution;  that  is,  by 
those  very  ingenious  checks  and  balances  de- 
signed by  the  convention  and  explained  in  the 
Federalist,  It  is  an  interesting  fact,  corrobora- 
tive, I  think,  of  much  that  I  have  said,  that  the 
chief  complaint  to-day  heard  about  the  execu- 
tive office  is  that  the  tenure  ought  to  be  longer 
than  four  years,  and  elections  less  frequent. 

When  we  come  to  the  judicial  power,  we  see 
the  view  of  government  which  is  founded  on  re- 
sponsibility at  its  clearest.  The  object  is  to  get 
a  judiciary  which  will  be  incorrupt,  competent, 
and  absolutely  independent  of  the  legislature 
and  of  the  executive.  The  appointment  is  given 
to  the  President  and  Senate,  so  that  the  pat- 


104         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ronage  may  not  absolutely  vest  in  either;  tenure 
is  made  during  good  behavior;  and  direct  re- 
sponsibility is  enforced  through  impeachment. 
But  the  responsibihty  of  a  judge  may  be  affected 
in  other  ways.  The  great  blight  upon  the  ju- 
dicial power  in  the  past  had  been  its  depen- 
dence upon  one  or  both  the  other  departments, 
through  removal  or  control  of  the  means  of  sup- 
port. The  danger  of  improper  removal  having 
been  obviated  by  making  the  tenure  practically 
for  life,  independence  as  to  salary  was  secured 
through  the  provision  that  federal  judges  shall 
receive  a  compensation  which  shall  not  be  dimin- 
ished during  their  continuance  in  office.  These 
provisions  left  the  federal  judges  free  to  dis- 
charge their  duty,  punishable  for  not  doing  it. 
Hamilton  foresaw  that  the  judiciary  would 
have  the  power  to  declare  unconstitutional  laws 
void  as  in  conflict  with  the  fundamental  law, 
but  he  also  knew  that  this  was  a  power  which 
would  never  lead  to  judicial  usurpation  for  the 
reason  that  the  judiciary  itself  has  no  power 
except  through  the  executive  arm.  This  is 
another  feature  of  judicial  responsibility  under 
our  system  which  people  seldom  notice.  Dema- 
gogues rant  about  the  danger  to  liberty  from 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE         105 

the  courts.  But,  as  Hamilton  pointed  out,  it  is 
the  other  departments  which  have  the  power  of 
the  purse  and  of  the  sword.  The  courts  have 
no  control  in  these  fields;  they  have  neither  force^ 
nor  will  of  their  own,  but  merely  judgment.  It 
is  the  purely  rational  department.  This  is  the 
reason  why  it  has  always  been  so  difficult  to 
make  it  independent  and  secure;  it  is  also  the 
reason  why  it  does  not,  left  to  itself,  usurp. 

In  the  preceding  centuries  there  had  been  no 
difficulty  in  making  it  subservient  to  the  execu- 
tive or  the  people.  It  had  done  their  bidding 
only  too  well.  It  had  condemned  Socrates,  it 
had  committed  thousands  of  judicial  murders, 
it  had  stifled  the  press;  but  it  had  never  been 
made  by  deliberate  contrivance,  through  se- 
curity of  its  tenure  and  support,  at  once  inde- 
pendent and  responsible  solely  for  a  good  dis- 
charge of  the  judicial  office.  There  is  no  more 
convincing  demonstration  than  the  chapters  in 
the  Federalist  which  relate  to  this  subject.  If 
any  one  doubts  that  the  operation  of  a  govern- 
ment depends  upon  a  nice  study  of  the  play  of 
human  motive  under  the  influence  of  constant 
causes,  he  should  carefully  study  them.  And  if 
not  satisfied  a  priori  with  the  reasoning,  let 


io6         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

him  ask  himself  as  to  the  result.  The  federal 
judiciary  as  a  matter  of  fact  has  played  for  more 
than  a  century  exactly  the  part  assigned  to  it 
by  the  framers  of  the  Constitution.  It  has  been 
powerful  by  weight  of  reasoning,  it  has  been  in- 
dependent in  the  exercise  of  power,  and  it  has 
been  uncorrupted.  It  has  vindicated  the  Con- 
stitution, and  been  a  wonderful  proof  of  what 
human  contrivance  and  forethought  can  do  in 
directing  the  operation  of  government  through 
the  play  of  ordinary  motive  in  such  a  way  that 
it  shall  prove  responsible  to  the  people  for  the 
efficient  performance  of  the  work  assigned  to  it. 
Turn  to  the  judiciary  of  the  States  and  see 
what  a  contrast  is  presented!  Taking  from  the 
early  phrasemongers  and  theorists  a  false  theory 
of  responsibility — that  it  could  only  be  obtained 
through  frequent  elections — the  States  have 
done  their  best  to  make  the  judiciary  the  foot- 
ball of  poHtics.  The  effect  of  the  elective  sys- 
tem in  those  great  centres  of  Hfe  where  we 
should  expect  to  find,  and  most  need,  the  best 
courts  is  to  throw  the  selection  of  judges  into 
the  hands  of  the  controller  of  the  local  ma- 
chine; i.  e.,  to  make  nominations  depend  upon 
his  favor;   in  other  words,  to  make  it  neces- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE         107 

sary  to  gain  and  keep  his  favor.  This  is  the  end 
of  independence  and  the  beginning  of  a  system 
of  purchase.  ResponsibiHty  is  now  in  part  re- 
sponsibility to  a^  secret  ^wer,  and  the  amount 

of  money  paid  for  nominations  becomes  a  mat- 
ter of  newspaper  discussion.  Favors  must  be 
paid  for  by  favors,  and  in  such  a  system  there 
can  never  be  the  assurance  of  purity  nor  inde- 
pendence nor  ability.  The  leaders  of  the  bar 
cannot  get  onto  the  bench.^ 

In  all  this  there  is  nothing  novel;  the  facts 
have  been  known  and  admitted  for  a  long  time; 
the  deplorable  thing  is  that  it  is  not  yet  per- 
ceived that  the  whole  system  is  the  ripe  fruit  of  a 
false  theory  of  democracy,  which  cannot  be  got  j 
rid  of  by  any  means  short  of  its  abandonment. 
Here  you  have  side  by  side  the  two  systems, 
one,  the  operation  of  which  has  been  demon- 
strated in  two  countries,  England  and  the  United 
States,  and  several  of  our  older  States;  the  other, 
frequently  denounced  by  the  press  of  the  com- 
mercial capital  of  the  country,  in  a  State  which 
contains  something  like  a  tenth  of  the  popula- 

^  In  our  time  the  absence  of  names  of  leaders  of  the  bar,  in 
the  city  of  New  York,  of  the  first  rank,  who  have  gone  onto  the 
Supreme  bench,  or  that  of  the  Court  of  Appeals,  has  often  been 
noticed. 


io8         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tion  of  the  whole  country.  The  only  reply  that 
I  have  ever  heard  is  that  the  elective  system 
works  well  "in  the  country."  What  this  really 
means  is  that  its  evil  effects  are  by  no  means  so 
evident  in  the  country,  where  the  interests  at 
stake  are  usually  not  so  great.  But  what  is 
wanted  is  a  judiciary  which  is  as  nearly  perfect 
as  possible  in  the  great  cities.  Our  population 
and  wealth  have  ceased  to  be  rural.  In  Massa- 
chusetts and  a  few  other  States,  judicial  systems 
substantially  the  same  as  that  of  the  United 
States  have  been  preserved;  in  those  there  is 
no  such  scandal,  and  no  such  singular  com- 
parison to  be  made  with  the  federal  judiciary. 

In  1902  a  representative  of  the  Standard  Oil 
Company  wrote  to  Senator  Foraker  reminding 
him  of  Judge  Burket's  candidacy  for  re-election 
to  the  Supreme  Court  bench  of  Ohio,  urging 
his  re-election  strongly  on  the  ground  of  "his 
eminent  qualifications  and  great  integrity,"  and 
expressing  the  hope  that  he  (Senator  Foraker) 
would  aid  his  re-election.  There  could  not  be  a 
better  illustration  of  the  way  the  elective  ma- 
chinery for  judges  works  to  degrade  the  judi- 
ciary. The  idea  that  a  great  corporation  (and 
most  of  the  wealth  of  the  country  is  in  the  hands 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE         109 

of  corporations),  always  in  the  courts  as  plaintiff 
or  defendant,  will  spend  the  whole  year  in  care- 
fully looking  after  its  own  interests  and  then  at 
election  time  stop  and  devote  itself  to  securing 
impartial  judges,  responsible  only  to  the  people, 
is  founded  on  a  conception  of  human  nature 
and  ideas  of  government  which  are  nonsensical. 
What  they  will  do,  as  we  all  know,  is  to  fur- 
ther the  election  of  judges  who  are  not  likely  to 
be  adverse  to  them;  and  in  such  a  case,  however 
eminent  and  honest  a  judge  may  be,  as  he  always 
knows  in  the  long  run  who  his  supporters  are, 
he  will  be  made  to  feel  that  he  owes  his  place 
in  a  measure  to  this  very  corporation.  However 
excellent  the  man,  there  is  an  attempt  to  put 
him  under  the  influence  of  improper  motives. 
It  is  not  only  his  integrity,  but  general  confi- 
dence in  his  integrity,  that  is  wanted;  when  the 
letter  to  Senator  Foraker  became  pubhc,  this  it 
was  that  made  a  scandal  of  it.  The  only  pos- 
sible means  of  doing  away  with  this  pitfall  is 
the  selection  of  judges  by  other  than  elective 
machinery  and  making  their  tenure  secure. 

The  operation  of  this  false  theory  of  responsi- 
biHty,  which  seeks  to  secure  good  government  by 
short  tenure  and  constant  appeal  to  the  elective 


no         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

principle,  is  most  clearly  seen  in  the  judicial  sys- 
tem, but  it  exists  everywhere.  "When  annual 
elections  end  tyranny  begins"  does  not  find 
an  echo  in  our  breasts  to-day,  because  we  have 
learned  by  bitter  experience  that  frequent  elec- 
tions are  no  safeguard  against  bossdom.  The 
movement  for  biennial  elections  which  has 
spread  over  the  United  States  in  our  time  would 
never  have  gained  such  headway,  or  gone  into 
operation  in  so  many  States,  had  it  not  been 
found  that  the  shortness  of  the  term  of  the  legis- 
lature was  of  no  avail  in  this  respect.  Can  any- 
thing be  conceived  which  will  more  certainly 
produce  irresponsible  legislatures  in  a  commu- 
nity like  ours  than  a  short  term  of  office?  The 
shortness  of  the  term  makes  the  tenure  insecure, 
while  the  amount  of  work  required  is  very  con- 
siderable; men  of  the  first  rank  in  character  or 
position  cannot  afford  to  spend  half  the  year 
in  such  routine  work  as  that  of  the  State  legis- 
latures. Forty  years  ago  it  was  argued  that  the 
whole  difficulty  came  from  people  being  unwill- 
ing to  go  to  the  primaries  and  "attend  to  their 
political  duties."  Now,  the  work  of  the  State 
legislatures  being  thoroughly  satisfactory  to  no- 
body, the  far  saner  view  is  taken  that  we  may  at 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE         iii 

any  rate  cut  it  down  in  amount  and  expense  by 
giving  up  the  annual  use  of  them.  If  an  exami- 
nation be  made  as  to  the  amount  of  general  legis- 
lation needed  annually  by  such  States  as  New 
York  or  Massachusetts,  it  will  be  found  to  be 
comparatively  small.  A  large  part  of  the  or- 
dinary work  of  the  governor  of  New  York  has 
come  to  consist  of  vetoing  bills  plainly  uncon- 
stitutional or  otherwise  improper.  But  in  Mas- 
sachusetts tyranny  is  still  kept  at  bay  by  annual 
elections,  and  in  New  York,  while  we  have  a 
biennially  elected  Senate,  we  still  have  an  an- 
nual legislature. 

In  New  York,  certainly,  it  is  not  generally 
believed  that  increase  of  legislation  means  in- 
creased good  government.  In  1870  the  legis- 
lature turned  out  two  bulky  volumes  of  statutes, 
nearly  two  thousand  four  hundred  pages  in  all. 
The  downfall  of  Tweed  and  the  improvement  of 
the  membership  of  the  legislature  followed,  and 
in  1879  they  produced  a  modest  volume  of  some 
seven  hundred  pages.  By  1908  the  volumes 
were  again  swollen  to  the  old  dimensions.  It 
is  often  forgotten  that  the  law  of  supply  and 
demand  appHes  with  peculiar  force  to  legisla- 
tion.   The  assemblage  of  the  legislature  is  vir- 


112  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tually  the  establishment  of  a  statute  factory 
open  to  all  comers;  it  fosters  legislation  of  itself. 
In  Mississippi,  where  there  are  no  enormous 
cities,  they  only  allow  the  legislature  to  meet 
once  in  four  years,  with  the  exception  of  a  spe- 
cial session  of  thirty  days,  which  cannot  be 
lengthened  except  by  the  governor.  At  such 
special  sessions  none  but  appropriation  and 
revenue  bills  can  be  considered,  or  extraordinary 
matters  called  to  the  attention  of  the  legislature 
by  the  governor.  If  when  annual  elections  end 
tyranny  begins,  tyranny  would  certainly  seem 
to  have  taken  root  in  Mississippi.  Yet  we  hear 
no  complaints  of  it,  though  these  provisions 
have  been  in  force  for  some  twenty  years. 

Responsibility  to  the  people  by  annual  elec- 
tion sounded  a  hundred  years  ago  to  the  Demo- 
cratic theorists  as  if  they  had  discovered  a  law 
in  the  moral  world  of  the  same  sort  of  value  as 
the  law  of  gravitation  in  the  physical.  When 
stated  it  seemed  to  prove  itself.  The  power  of 
phrases  and  the  ease  with  which  they  are  used 
to  influence  political  action  was  never  better 
illustrated.  Contarini  Fleming,  the  youthful 
hero  of  Disraeli's  novel,  comes  back  from  school 
to  his  father — a  pubhc  man  and  pohtical  philos- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE         113 

opher  of  a  species  that  never  dies — and  com- 
plains to  him  bitterly  that  he  is  taught  nothing 
but  "words."  His  father,  wishing  to  get  at  what 
is  in  his  mind,  asks  him  what  he  would  be 
taught.  "Ideas,"  he  cries  passionately.  "My 
son,"  his  father  says,  "few  ideas  are  correct 
ones,  and  what  are  correct  no  one  can  ascertain; 
but  with  words  we  govern  men." 

To  sum  up  what  has  been  said:  Bentham  and 
Jefferson,  both  extraordinary  men,  gifted  with 
a  prophetic  poHtical  insight,  foresaw,  one  in 
England,  the  other  in  America,  the  reign  of 
democracy,  and  pointed  out  the  principle  on 
which  it  must  rest.  But,  Hke  many  other  great 
men,  the  very  clearness  with  which  they  saw 
one  aspect  of  the  subject  blinded  them  to  the 
fact  that  they  did  not  see  the  whole  of  it.  Ham- 
ilton, a  genius  of  another  sort,  saw  exactly  what 
they  failed  to  perceive.  Two  succeeding  gen- 
erations neglected  what  Hamilton  saw,  and 
blindly  misapplied  in  every  direction  the  prin- 
ciples of  Bentham  and  Jefferson.  In  accom- 
pHshing  its  work  the  historical  party  which  did 
this  very  nearly  destroyed  itself.  In  its  effort 
to  enforce  responsibility  through  elective  ma- 
chinery it  has  paralyzed  real  responsibihty  in 


114         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

every  direction,  and  has,  some  people  think, 
become  incapable  of  either  producing  leaders  or 
of  holding  its  old  opponent  to  that  party  re- 
sponsibility which  it  once  knew  how  to  teach. 
Can  it  retrace  its  steps  ?  Or,  rather,  can  we  re- 
trace ours?  For,  at  present,  the  delusion  as 
to  responsibility  being  attainable  by  the  bal- 
lot alone  seems  to  infect  both  parties  almost 
equally. 


LECTURE  IF 
PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE 

In  the  previous  lectures  I  have  endeavored 
to  estabhsh  the  following  points  with  reference 
to  popular  government,  such  as  that  under 
which  we  live.  First,  that  a  popular  govern- 
ment, though  partly  a  growth,  so  far  as  its  oper- 
ation is  arranged  beforehand  by  human  design, 
must  be  contrived  upon  some  theory;  second, 
that  this  theory  must  depend  on  the  view  we 
take  both  of  the  nature  of  man  and  of  the  nature 
of  government;  third,  that  with  regard  to  the 
former  the  one  point  upon  which  there  is  a 
general  agreement  is  that,  for  the  satisfaction 
of  certain  wants,  some  of  which  are  constant 
while  others  vary  with  surrounding  circum- 
stances, man  is  capable  of  imposing  upon  his 
fellows,  and  his  fellows  are  willing  to  undertake 
an  artificial  species  of  responsibility  acting 
through  constant  motives,  which  may  be  aided 
by,  or,  on  the  other  hand,  run  counter  to,  what 
we  call  moral  and  religious  responsibility,^  and 

*  The  buccaneers  of  the  Spanish  Main  established  among  them- 
selves for  a  time  a  species  of  anti-social  order,  enforced  by  a  rigid 
117 


Ii8         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

under  which  the  officer  or  servant  of  the  gov- 
ernment becomes  answerable  for  a  political 
task;  fourth,  that  side  by  side  with,  or  rather 
within,  this  machinery  of  pohtical  responsibil- 
ity exists  the  every-day  legal  responsibility  of 
the  citizen, or  subject,  for  his  acts  and  omissions, 
the  task  here  being  the  administration  of  justice 
(one  of  the  constant  wants  of  man) ;  fifth,  that 
in  what  we  call  a  republic,  i.  e.,  a  community 
living  under  common  laws  and  a  popular  gov- 
ernment within  defined  boundaries,  this  respon- 
sibility is  ultimately  founded  on  the  idea  of 
answerabiHty  to  the  people,  or  community  as  a 
whole,  through  the  exercise  of  the  suffrage; 
sixth,  that,  from  the  time  of  Jefferson  down  to 
our  day,  the  mistake  had  been  made,  in  our 
theory  and  practice,  of  assuming  that,  because 
the  ultimate  responsibility  was  to  the  people, 
therefore  the  way  to  secure  responsibility  in 
office  must  uniformly  be  through  some  sort  of 
elective  machinery;  that  not  merely  would  the 
legislative  and  executive  head  be  responsible  to 
the  people  if  elected  by  the  people,  but  that  this 
principle  was  equally  true  of  every  sheriff,  as- 

responsibility  comprehending  a  quasi  legal  system  of  rewards 
and  punishments — the  object  of  the  whole  being  plunder  by  means 
of  piracy  and  rapine. 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     119 

sessor,  collector,  or  other  subordinate;  that  not 
merely  must  legislators  be  elected,  but  that  they 
must  be  elected  as  often  as  possible;  finally, 
that,  in  exactly  the  same  way,  judges  would  not 
really  be  responsible  for  the  proper  discharge  of 
their  duty  unless  they  too  were  all  elected  fre- 
quently; seventh,  that,  by  a  still  further  and  cu- 
rious misapplication  of  an  idea  in  itself  not  er- 
roneous, the  monstrous  conclusion  was  reached 
that  a  short  tenure  of  office,  as  it  sometimes  pro- 
duced greater  responsibihty  when  the  office  was 
elective,  would  also  produce  it  when  the  tenure 
was  by  appointment.^ 

To  trace  all  the  consequences  of  this  mistake 
would  require  a  great  deal  of  time,  but  what 
may  be  worth  while  is  to  point  out  some  of  its 
consequences  in  regard  to  the  operation  of  the 
principle  of  responsibihty;  and,  above  all,  the 
connection  of  the  mistake  with  the  creation  of 
that  contrivance  within  a  contrivance  which  we 
know  and  justly  dread  as  the  great  enemy  in 
our  day  of  individual  freedom  and  character  in 

*  Rotation  in  office,  supposed  to  have  been  originally  adopted 
in  the  states  of  antiquity  in  obedience  to  an  analogy  between  the 
functions  of  government  and  the  apparent  rotation  in  its  orbit 
of  the  sun,  notwithstanding  it  had  become  a  gross  abuse,  was 
stoutly  defended  down  to  a  very  recent  period  as  vitally  connected 
with  the  principle  of  responsibility. 


I20         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

government — the  Machine — our  incarnation  of 
what  might  be  called  the  ancient  enemy  of  all 
good  government — Patronage. 

When  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
was  framed,  the  modern  system  of  nomination 
by  regularly  organized  representative  bodies 
was  undreamed  of.  The  suffrage  was  in  the 
hands  of  property  owners,  a  comparatively  small 
class,  and  nominations  were  very  much  what  we 
should  now  like  to  have  them — free.  There  were 
no  primaries,  there  were  no  town,  county,  dis- 
trict, state,  or  national  conventions  of  nominat- 
ing delegates.  There  were  no  "bosses"  or  office 
brokers.  There  was  no  great  body  of  civil  ser- 
vants because  there  were  no  great  federal  or 
state  fields  of  administration.  It  would  have 
been  a  miraculously  gifted  vision  which  could 
have  foreseen  the  change  a  hundred  years  was 
to  produce.  The  story  of  that  change — how  the 
original  freedom  of  nomination  was  strangled  by 
the  caucus,  and  this,  to  restore  freedom,  was 
supplanted  by  the  convention  system;  how  this 
latter  system,  originally  intended  to  make  nomi- 
nations representative,  became  in  the  course 
of  fifty  years  a  means  of  throwing  the  control 
of  nominations  everywhere  into  the  hands  of 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     121 

smaller  and  smaller  numbers  of  people,  until  in 
New  York,  the  greatest  centre  of  population  in 
the  country,  they  now  fall  for  years  at  a  time 
into  the  hands  of  one  man — the  head  of  Tam- 
many Hall;  how  in  both  parties  the  same  causes 
produced  the  same  effects,  and  the  national 
machine  was  so  perfected  with  the  aid  of  the 
skeleton  negro  delegations  from  the  South  as 
to  bring  within  potential  practical  politics  a 
presidential  convention,  controlled  from  Wash- 
ington by  long-distance  telephone — all  this  is 
familiar  to  us.  It  has  produced  a  state  of  things 
generally  recognized  as  highly  dangerous  to  free 
institutions;  it  produces  frequent  revolts  and 
continuous  dissatisfaction  and  resentment.  It 
was  the  cause  of  the  movement  for  the  Aus- 
tralian ballot,  for  independent  nominations  by 
petition,  for  the  independent  non-partisan  move- 
ment in  politics,  which  has  long  made  the 
wealthiest  and  most  populous  State  in  the 
Union  "doubtful'*;  and,  finally,  of  the  move- 
ment for  the  initiative,  the  referendum,  the 
recall,  and  "direct  primaries.'* 

The  Machine,  as  it  flourishes  among  us,  al- 
though intrenched  in  party,  is  not  party  gov- 
ernment, with  what  used   to  be  called   party 


122         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

responsibility.  That  responsibility  which,  as  I 
have  already  said,  still  exists  in  a  highly  de- 
veloped form  in  England,  was,  as  far  as  it  went, 
a  real,  natural,  extra-governmental  responsi- 
bility, re-enforcing  the  contrived  political  re- 
sponsibility upon  which  the  actual  operation  of 
government  necessarily  rests.  It  grows  nat- 
urally out  of  a  wide  division  in  public  opinion  as 
to  the  proper  policy  to  be  pursued  by  the  gov- 
ernment, and  through  it  either  party,  having 
obtained  possession  of  the  government,  is  made 
accountable  for  misgovernment  by  being  turned 
out  of  office.  It  was  this  sort  of  responsibility 
under  which  the  Democratic  party  enjoyed  its 
long  lease  of  power  before  the  war,  and  it  was 
finally  enforced  by  the  Republican  victory  in 
i860.  It  was  this  sort  of  responsibility  under 
which  the  Republican  party  administered  the 
government  down  to  1884,  and  which  the  vic- 
tory of  the  Democrats  under  Cleveland  in 
1884  and  1892  enforced.  In  England  party 
responsibility  is  enforced  whenever  the  Crown 
is  obliged  by  the  electorate  to  dispense  with  the 
service  of  the  ministry  for  the  time  being. 

The  machine,  or  organization,  as,  whenever  it 
attains  perfection,  it  is  called  by  its  adherents 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     123 

and  managers,  is  something  utterly  at  war  with 
this.  The  very  introduction  of  such  terms  shows 
how  little  it  has  to  do  with  public  opinion  or 
changes  in  it.  The  machine  is  an  organization, 
outside  of  the  government  itself,  consisting  of  a 
committee  or  committees,  or  congeries  of  com- 
mittees, representative  in  theory,  but  partly  self- 
perpetuating  in  fact,  which  exists  in  either  party  ^ 
for  the  control  of  nominations  and  the  allot- 
ment of  offices,  and  by  these  means  for  the  di- 
vision of  emoluments  and  profits.  It  consists 
of  "working''  politicians,  mostly  obscure  men, 
who  devote  whatever  time  is  necessary  to  poli- 
tics, and  are  enabled  to  do  it  by  their  irrespon- 
sible but  acknowledged  control  of  offices  and 
salaries  and  expenditures.  Responsible  to  no 
one,  either  legally  or  pohtically,  in  ordinary 
times  it  wields  the  power  of  the  party.  It  is 
controlled  by  leaders  whose  power  is  as  notorious 
as  its  source  is  hidden.  In  States  like  New  York, 
Pennsylvania,  Massachusetts,  and  Ohio  it  has 
at  its  head  a  single  man,  or  a  very  small  number 
of  men,  unscrupulous,  despotic,  and  secret.  The 
machine,  being  a  despotism  of  one  or  a  few, 
cannot  be  managed  democratically.  The  ma- 
chine may  be,  as  is  generally  the  case  with 


124         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

Tammany  Hall,  very  ignorant,  as  educated 
men  esteem  knowledge;  or  its  power  may  be,  if 
the  electorate  behind  the  machine  is  of  a  better 
sort,  lodged  in  the  hands  of  a  man  of  position 
and  education;  but  in  any  case  its  function  is 
not  to  deal  with  matters  of  opinion  and  behef, 
but  to  maintain  a  highly  disciplined  organiza- 
tion, mihtary  in  the  blind  obedience  it  exacts 
from  legislative,  executive,  or  other  office-holders, 
in  return  for  which  it  brings  out  the  vote  when 
required,  the  vote  supplying  the  offices  and  sal- 
aries and  money  which  pay  the  troops  and  of- 
ficers and  employees  and  camp  followers.  The 
head  is  responsible  to  no  one,  and  may  not  even 
hold  office;  if  he  chooses  to  hold  office,  he  is  not 
responsible  in  office,  because  the  same  blind  obe- 
dience which  put  him  there  may  generally  be 
rehed  on  to  keep  him  there  in  case  he  wishes  to 
remain.  It  is  needless  to  give  illustrations.  I 
asked  the  owner  of  a  profitable  private  business, 
who  was  also  an  important  officer  of  a  leading 
State,  which  he  found  the  more  difficult  occupa- 
tions He  said  at  once,  "Oh,  my  own  business. 
In  politics  all  there  is  to  do  is  to  obey  orders." 
"The  tyranny  of  the  majority,  "against  which 
we  used  to  be  warned  by  critics  of  popular  insti- 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     125 

tutions,  was  the  tyranny  of  a  dead  level  of  opin- 
ions, habits,  beliefs,  and  aspirations,  such  as  a 
general  equality  of  condition  might  produce,  and 
such  as  some  writers  thought  it  did  produce 
fifty  years  ago  in  this  country.  But  the  tyranny 
of  the  machine  is  something  far  worse;  it  is  the 
negation  of  all  opinion,  and  the  substitution  for 
it  of  a  political  drill,  with  the  object  of  the  undis- 
puted control  of  patronage,  or,  in  other  words, 
the  offices,  combined  with  immunity  from  all  re- 
sponsibiHty.  It  is  tyranny  come  to  Hfe  again  in 
the  very  centre  of  free  institutions.  So  far  as  it 
is  effective,  free  thought  and  free  action  die. 

If  this  view  of  the  subject  is  correct,  it  is  clear 
that  the  great  democratic  mistake  of  multi- 
plying elections,  shortening  terms,  and  using  the 
suffrage  on  every  possible  occasion  as  a  decisive 
test  has  been  the  one  thing  predestined  to  pro- 
mote the  development  of  the  machine.  In  the 
eyes  of  our  theorists  the  people  of  the  State  of 
New  York  are  more  perfectly  protected  against 
abuse  of  power  on  the  part  of  rulers  than  any 
other  people  in  the  world.  They  have  an  annual 
session  for  the  lower  house;  their  judges  are 
elected,  hold  office  for  a  definite  term,  and  are 
consequently  responsible  to  the  people;    elec- 


126         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tions  of  all  sorts  are  frequent  and  fair.  In  fact, 
there  probably  is  no  other  place  in  the  world 
where,  in  the  course  of  a  year,  one  can  vote  for  so 
many  candidates.  But  in  fact  their  government 
is  parcelled  out  by  a  close  corporation,  or  rather 
two  close  corporations,  which,  nominally  opposed 
to  each  other,  have  frequently  had  in  the  past 
a  complete  understanding.  By  common  con- 
sent the  result  is  unsatisfactory  and  undesirable, 
and  at  long  intervals,  as  at  the  present  time,  a 
revolution  ousts  one  machine  or  the  other.  But 
not  generally  for  long.  When  the  popular  pas- 
sion subsides,  and  the  popular  Hercules  who 
has  swept  out  the  Augean  stable  rests  from  his 
labors,  or  is  elevated  by  his  enemies  into  some 
position  where  he  becomes  harmless  to  them, 
the  machine  works  again  smoothly,  the  slate 
made  up  in  secret  is  unanimously  adopted  by 
the  prearranged  convention,  and  the  straight 
ticket  is  voted  again. 

We  have  apparently  verified,  in  this  state  of 
things,  the  predictions  of  aristocratic  critics  of 
democracy,  that  the  barbarians  fitted  to  destroy 
our  civilization  would  not  come  from  outside, 
but  would  be  produced  from  the  inside. 

As  was  said  in  the  last  lecture,  the  great  puz- 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE  127 

zle  of  American  politics  at  the  present  time  is  the 
apparent  paralysis  of  the  opposition.^  Why  is 
the  destiny  of  the  country  dominated  by  one 
party,  although  there  is  probably,  so  far  as 
can  be  judged  from  the  press,  just  as  much  divi- 
sion of  opinion  as  to  political  matters  as  there 
ever  was?  As  in  the  case  of  any  other  great 
fact  of  contemporaneous  history,  there  are  no 
doubt  many  causes;  but  one  of  them  at  least 
seems  connected  with  the  error  already  adverted 
to.  The  Democratic  party  assumed  originally  a 
comparatively  simple  task — that  of  democratiz- 
ing our  institutions.  To  make  suffrage  uni- 
versal, and  make  all  offices  possible  elective,  and 
to  have  elections  frequent,  required  no  great 
genius,  but  chiefly  the  comprehension  of  a  sim- 
ple contrivance,  the  extension  of  which  they 
took  to  be  a  fundamental  principle  of  popular 
government — by  such  means  only  could  respon- 
sibility to  the  people  be  made  effective.  But 
all  this  was  long  ago  accompHshed,  and  it  is  now 
pretty  clear  that  the  principle  is  not  fundamental 
— that  the  means  supposed  to  be  required  by  it 
really  produce,  not  responsibiHty,  but  the  ma- 

^When  these  lectures  were  delivered,  "Bryanism"  showed  as 
yet  no  sign  of  waning. 


128         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

chine  and  irresponsibility.  And,  accordingly, 
to-day  the  Democratic  party  is  little  more  than 
an  organization  for  the  control  and  delivery  of 
votes.  It  cannot  produce  new  ideas  or  get 
statesmen  to  lead  it;  its  fundamental  idea  hav- 
ing been  already  discovered  and  expounded  and 
applied  and  exhausted,  there  is  nothing  more  to 
do.  If  it  does  not  work  as  was  expected,  the 
party  cannot  abandon  it  and  take  some  new  one 
up.  Consequently  the  followers  of  Jefferson  are 
thrown  into  the  arms  of  demagogues  who  tell 
them  that  there  has  been  no  mistake  at  all;  that 
all  that  is  needed  is  more  democratization;  as 
at  first  what  was  needed  was  democratization  of 
the  machinery  for  the  operation  of  government, 
so  now  what  is  needed  is  democratization  so- 
cially— the  redistribution  of  wealth,  the  enforce- 
ment of  equaHty  of  condition,  the  abolition  of 
poverty;  in  fact,  exactly  that  sort  of  socialism 
which  political  and  economical  doctrinaires  have 
been  preaching  in  France  and  Germany  as  the 
"next  step."  In  this  way  the  American  De- 
mocracy, historically  not  only  the  "least  gov- 
ernment," but  the  States'  Rights  party,  has  been 
led  into  its  present  ridiculous  position  of  trying 
to  outbid  the  demagogues  of  the  party  of  cen- 


•     PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     129 

tralization  in  the  advocacy  of  every  sort  of 
Federal  government  interference  with  individ- 
ual Hberty  and  property,  and  espionage  and 
confiscation  of  the  goods  of  the  rich,  in  the  in- 
terest of  a  new  "distribution"  which  will  seem 
proper  to  the  distributees.  How  an  opposition 
party  might  be  created  was  seen  in  the  days  of 
Tilden  and  Cleveland,  who  both,  though  origi- 
nally sharing  the  Democratic  delusion  that  re- 
sponsibility to  the  people  could  only  be  enforced 
through  elective  machinery,  came  to  perceive 
that  the  real  result  was  to  produce  the  machine, 
and  that  at  that  time  the  key  to  the  irrespon- 
sible power  of  the  machine  was  in  its  hold  on 
the  Federal  civil  service.  Being  men  who  could 
distinguish  facts  from  phrases  and  ideas,  they 
foresaw  that  the  key  to  a  new  great  democratic 
advance  lay  not  in  blindly  injecting  more  suffrage 
into  the  body  politic,  but  in  doing  what  had  been 
done  in  England,  abohshing  one  of  the  worst 
forms  of  privilege  known — patronage  in  this 
service.  They  took  up  the  "merit"  system, 
which  was  really  the  property  of  neither  party, 
and  so  long  as  they  were  in  control  the  Demo- 
cratic party  had  leaders  who  were  not  tied 
blindly  to  the  past.    But  they  left  no  heirs,  and 


^ 


130         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

for  twelve  years  the  national  Democratic  party- 
has  been  a  machine  worked  for  the  benefit  of  a 
single  man,  who  has  fed  his  followers  on  the 
delusions  and  whims  which  are  the  legitimate 
products  of  a  false  theory  of  government.  There 
could  hardly  be  a  more  valuable  illustration  of 
the  lasting  and  cohesive  power  of  this  curious 
kind  of  extra-political  and  irresponsible  organi- 
zation than  that  it  has  actually  maintained  a 
totally  unsuccessful  leader  at  the  head  of  a  once 
great  historical  party  for  twelve  years,  and 
found  means  to  supply  itself  with  the  sinews  of 
war  against  the  better  judgment  of  larger  and 
larger  numbers  of  those  who  nominally  sup- 
ported him. 

Of  course,  when  the  machine  is  spoken  of  as 
an  irresponsible  body,  what  is  meant  is  that  its 
agents  and  members  as  well  as  itself  are  ab- 
solutely unknown  to  the  Constitution  and  laws. 
No  one  connected  with  it  is  made  answerable  for 
anything  that  he  does,  to  any  organ  of  the  gov- 
ernment, and  practically  there  may  be  said  to 
be  hardly  any  responsibility  to  public  opinion 
or  "censure,"  because  the  power  of  this  incor- 
poreal body  is  so  great  as  to  be  above  it.  But 
within  the  organization  all  is  entirely  different. 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     131 

Being  an  imperium  in  itself,  the  machinery  of 
responsibility  must  be  found  in  it,  and  it  is  easy 
to  make  out  its  nature.  It  is  in  one  aspect  the 
responsibility  of  obedience  in  return  for  nu- 
trition— the  most  binding  and  primitive  form 
of  responsibility  known  to  man.  What  the 
"leader,"  the  boss,  the  committeeman,  really 
does  for  most  of  his  followers  is  to  provide  them 
with  meat  and  drink  and  clothes.  Obey,  and  the 
machine  will  provide  for  you;  disobey,  and  you 
will  be  left  to  yourself.  But  there  is  another  tie 
in  proper  cases.  Obey  and  you  shall  be  given 
a  career  and  honors.  Do  your  work,  whatever 
it  may  be,  and  the  reward  shall  be  honor  and 
place.  There  is  only  one  condition:  you  must 
be  dumb  and  blind.  The  machine  is  a  provi- 
dence to  its  followers.  There  are  even  further 
ties.  In  many  places,  for  instance,  the  machine 
is  able  to  get  for  its  supporters  wages  which 
are  above  the  prevaiHng  rate,  to  see  that  trouble- 
some creditors  are  kept  at  bay,  to  look  after  its 
criminals  when  in  trouble,  and  find  bail  for  them. 
When  we  ask  what  is  the  power  behind,  we  al- 
ways find  it  is  "the  organization,"  a  creature 
not  only  with  neither  soul  to  be  damned  nor 
body  to  be  punished,  but  without  even  legal 
identity  or  existence  to  be  established. 


V 


132         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

The  machine  of  a  party  not  in  control  of  the 
national  offices  is  powerful;  but  its  power  is 
as  nothing  when  compared  with  that  of  the 
machine  in  control  throughout  the  country  gen- 
erally. In  offices  held  by  administrative  ap- 
pointment, rotation  may  come  to  a  final  end  by 
civil-service  reform  and  tenure  during  good  be- 
havior, when  these  are  permanently  applied  to 
the  whole  administrative  system,  as  they  are  in 
great  measure  now.  But  they  are  still  in  im- 
perfect operation;  and  civil-service  reform  does 
not  affect  rotation  in  elective  offices,  the  centre 
of  most  of  the  intrigue  and  favoritism  which 
now  prevails.  Few  people  understand  to  what 
extent  this  system  of  rotation  has  been  carried. 
In  every  State  where  the  elective  system  has 
been  generally  applied  to  offices  formerly  non- 
elective,  and  where  elections  are  very  frequent 
and  elective  machinery  complex,  the  system  is 
carried  out  to  a  remarkable  degree  of  perfec- 
tion, and  the  vast  body  of  candidates  for  local 
office  is  rotated  into  them  and  out  of  them, 
through  its  control  of  nominations,  by  the  ma- 
chine, so  that  by  diligence  and  constant  work 
the  meanest  laborer  in  the  field  may  aspire  to 
high  place.  This  system,  of  course,  involves 
the  absence  of  responsibility  to  anybody  but 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     133 

the  nominating  power — to  that  power  a  tie  of 
absolute  submission.  It  must  always  be  remem- 
bered that  salaries,  as  well  as  the  creation  of 
offices,  are  in  the  hands  of  the  legislature,  and 
that  the  legislature  is  made  up  as  far  as  is  pos- 
sible of  creatures  of  the  machine.  Thirty-five 
years  ago  volunteers  used  to  go  to  Albany  to 
argue  before  committees  in  favor  of  or  against 
proposals  of  legislation.  Now  those  who  wish 
to  influence  legislation  have  private  interviews 
in  private  rooms  with  the  quiet  men  who  con- 
trol the  legislators.  It  is  easy  to  see  why  this 
system  tends  to  produce  more  and  more  offices, 
as  it  is  by  increasing  the  number  of  offices  that 
the  machine  constantly  increases  its  hold  upon 
the  party  and  through  the  party  upon  the  gov- 
ernment. We  used  to  ask  ourselves  what  the 
ideal  state  will  be.  The  ideal  state  under  ma- 
chine government  will  be  one  in  which  every  one 
who  interests  himself  in  politics  may  have  the 
hope  of  filling,  at  any  rate  for  a  short  time,  some 
office,  while  in  consequence  all  those  who  interest 
themselves  in  political  work  will  have  an  interest 
in  the  constant  increase  of  taxes;  they  will  all 
be  at  the  public  table  every  day  and  the  entire 
community  will  pay  for  the  meal.    The  machine 


-/ 


134         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ideal  of  democratic  institutions  is,  in  other 
words,  the  multiplication  of  offices  and  the  dis- 
sipation of  responsibility  in  them.  The  machine 
Utopia  is  entirely  attainable. 

The  machine  is  the  ripe  fruit  in  a  popular 
government,  where  there  is  an  enormous  amount 
of  money  to  spend,  of  the  primal  curse  of  all 
governments  of  kings  and  aristocracies — Patron- 
age.^ 

The  machine  not  only  enjoys  irresponsible 
power  itself,  but  through  its  control  of  nomi- 
nations it  tends  to  destroy  all  responsibility  in 


*  Go  back  to  the  early  part  of  the  last  century  and  you  find  in 
England,  in  the  "rotten  boroughs"  and  the  control  of  places  in  the 
civil  service,  a  corrupt  system  of  patronage  less  secret,  and  con- 
sequently less  effective.  Favor  or  caprice  were  the  grounds  of 
appointment  and  made  the  tenure  even  of  elective  offices  depend- 
ent on  favor.  It  was  through  this  system  that  the  king  was  able 
to  make  the  American  war  last  for  seven  years,  and  all  electoral 
reform  was  blocked  until  the  reform  bill  of  1832.  A  political  agent 
like  Rigby  bore  a  close  resemblance  to  what  we  should  call  "an 
active  organization  man."  So  habituated  had  people  become  to 
it,  it  seemed  to  be  an  integral  part  of  the  government,  and  the 
Duke  of  Wellington  asked  pathetically,  on  finding  that  he  could 
not  withstand  the  tide  of  Parliamentary  reform:  "Then  how  is 
the  King's  government  to  be  carried  on?"  VVhea,  later,  it  was 
for  the  first  time  proposed  to  abolish  patronage  in  the  civil  service 
here,  all  the  politicians  who  had  made  their  way  to  power  by  aid 
of  it  protested  that  without  patronage  people  would  not  perform 
their  political  duties.  It  proved  extremely  difficult  to  get  any- 
body to  believe  that  people  went  to  the  polls  from  any  but  in- 
terested motives. 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE    135 

office,  the  very  principle,  that  is,  on  which  all 
government  rests.  The  office-holder  becomes 
responsible  to  it,  while  nominally  answerable 
in  the  quarter  designed  by  the  scheme  of  gov- 
ernment. This  we  see  every  day  in  the  legis- 
lature. The  member  is  in  theory  answerable 
to  his  constituents.  But  he  knows  that  in  nine 
cases  out  of  ten  his  constituents  have  nothing 
whatever  to  do  with  sending  him  to  the  legisla- 
ture or  keeping  him  there,  except  through  vot- 
ing for  him  or  against  him  at  the  polls,  and  that 
the  whole  body  of  his  party  will  vote  for  him  if 
he  gets  the  nomination  of  the  machine.  Know- 
ing this,  the  temptation  is  almost  overwhelming 
to  become  a  henchman  of  the  organization, 
which  practically  means  making  a  bargain  with 
the  person  who  controls  it  to  take  orders  from^ 
him  while  in  the  legislature.  Instead  of  being 
the  representative  of  a  popular  constituency,  he 
is  the  agent  of  the  machine,  and  his  continued 
tenure  of  office  depends  on  his  fidehty  to  it. 
This  gives  the  machine  the  absolute  control  of 
the  party  vote,  and  legislation  is  either  blocked 
or  permitted  to  go  through  by  arrangement  with 
the  head  of  the  machine.  This  is  the  system 
which  has  taken  the  place  of  the  old-fashioned 


136         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

lobbying,  which  could  not  outlive  the  individual 
independence  of  members.  The  lobbyist  for- 
merly had  to  approach  members.  He  now  deals 
with  the  patron  of  the  members.  During  the 
Piatt  regime  at  Albany  this  was  understood  to 
have  greatly  simplified  the  operation  of  gov- 
ernment. It  has  a  great  additional  advantage 
in  putting  a  stop  to  all  tedious  debate  and  dis- 
cussion. The  member  who  expects  to  vote  as  he 
is  told  has  no  motive  for  debate  or  discussion. 
In  State  legislatures,  the  control  obtained  by 
the  machine  over  the  Speaker  has  been  a  most 
important  step.  The  Speaker,  formerly  a  ju- 
dicial officer,  Hke  the  Speaker  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  or  the  presiding  officer  of  the  Senate, 
has  obtained  almost  autocratic  power  in  the 
advancing  or  retarding  of  legislation.  Given 
a  thoroughly  "harmonious"  machine,  and  a 
speaker  as  its  agent,  the  House  of  Representa- 
tives easily  vies  with  the  legislature  at  Albany. 
By  ** harmony"  is  always  meant  a  blind  and 
unscrupulous  obedience  of  orders. 

The  operation  of  the  machine  in  executive 
offices,  whenever  these  offices  are  elective,  is,  if 
anything,  worse.  The  selectmen  of  a  town,  the 
trustees  of  a  village,  or  any  elective  commission 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     137 

can  easily  be  brought  under  its  power,  with  the 
same,  and  sometimes  worse,  results.  These 
bodies,  in  theory,  are  responsible  in  solido  for 
the  discharge  of  their  duties.  They  are  supposed 
to  exercise  jointly  all  the  functions  of  their 
office,  and  to  be  answerable  for  the  non-perform- 
ance of  them.  But  this  sort  of  responsibility  is 
soon  sapped.  As  soon  as  they  find  that  what 
really  keeps  them  in  office  is  not  answerability  to 
the  constituency  but  obedience  to  the  orders  of 
their  nominators,  they  find  it  much  easier  to 
parcel  out  among  themselves  the  duties  of  the 
office.  For  with  the  duties  goes  the  patronage, 
and,  for  the  proper  disposition  of  this,  the  ma- 
chine needs  individual  responsibihty  to  itself 
and  must  have  it.  Under  this  system  one  mem- 
ber may  be  given  the  roads,  another  the  police, 
another  sanitary  matters,  and  the  salaries  of  sub- 
ordinates or  pay  of  employees  in  these  different 
branches  go  to  him  also.  He  parcels  these  out 
in  obedience  to  orders  from  above;  the  com- 
mission as  a  whole  is  responsible  in  theory  to 
the  constituency  for  the  result,  but  in  fact  not 
to  anybody;  while  each  official  gets  renomi- 
nated or  promoted  if  his  behavior  with  regard 
to  patronage,  jobs,  and  pay  is  satisfactory  to  a 


138         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

body  which  has  no  legal  or  responsible  existence 
at  all. 

Taking  the  government  as  a  whole,  the  ma- 
chine is  either  locally  or  ubiquitously  an  zw- 
perium  in  imperio  which  estabhshes,  through 
its  control  over  nominations,  the  responsibility 
of  the  official  to  itself,  and  practically  dispenses 
him  from  that  responsibility  to  the  people  on 
which  popular  government  alone  can,  in  the  long 
run,  rest,  and  which  we  mistakenly  believe  to  be 
enforced  by  perpetual  elections.  Its  control 
over  nominations  is  obtained  through  the  com- 
plexity of  the  nominating  system  and  the  mul- 
tiplicity of  elections,  both  of  which  have  come 
from  a  mistaken  idea  that  responsibility  to  the 
people  can  only  be  secured  through  elective  ma- 
chinery and  short  terms  of  office.  The  electoral 
machine,  as  it  now  exists,  is  analogous  to,  though 
not  exactly  the  same  as,  the  "spoils  system,** 
which  was  developed  in  the  Federal  civil  service 
through  rotation.  It  could  be  established,  worst 
of  all,  just  as  thoroughly  in  the  judicial  system, 
by  making  judicial  terms  very  short,  as  well  as 
making  them  elective.  Fortunately  we  have 
been  saved  from  this  extreme  in  the  Federal 
government  by  the  tenure  having  been  made 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE    139 

that  of  good  behavior,  and  in  the  State  govern- 
ments by  the  fact  that  "judicial  spoils"  are 
not  generally  very  rich.  But  in  New  York  an 
approximation  to  machine  judges  has  been 
made,  and  under  Mr.  Croker  was  quite  success- 
ful. His  testimony  before  the  Mazet  committee 
has  been  often  repubhshed.  He  expected  judges, 
he  said,  to  act  on  the  bench  *'as  members  of  the 
party"  and  appoint  Tammany  referees,  a  very 
considerable  part  of  the  business  of  the  courts 
being  in  the  hands  of  referees.  The  following 
were  some  of  the  questions  and  answers: 

"Q.  So  we  have  it,  then,  that  you,  participat- 
ing in  the  selection  of  judges  before  election, 
participate  in  the  emolument  that  comes  away 
down  at  the  end  of  their  judicial  proceeding, 
namely,  in  judicial  sales.?     A.  Yes,  sir. 

"Q.  And  it  goes  into  your  pocket?  A.  I  get 
— that  is,  a  part  of  my  profit. 

**Q.  And  the  nomination  of  a  judge  on  the 
Tammany  Hall  ticket  in  this  city  is  almost 
equivalent  to  an  election,  is  it  not?    A.  Yes,  sir. 

"Q.  So  that,  if  you  have  a  controlling  voice 
in  the  affairs  of  your  party,  and  secure  the  nomi- 
nation of  true  men,  you  may  be  sure  that  at 
least  in  the  real-estate  exchange  and  in  the  firm 


I40         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

of  Meyer  &  Croker  you  will,  as  a  true  Demo- 
crat, get  some  of  that  patronage?  A.  We  at 
least  expect  he  will  be  friendly  to  us. 

**Q.  And  you  get  some  of  the  patronage? 
A.  We  hope  so. 

*'Q.  Then  you  are  working  for  your  own 
pocket,  are  you  not?    A.  All  the  time." 

The  following  is  an  account  of  county  ma- 
chinery taken  from  a  leading  Massachusetts 
newspaper,  analyzing  a  report  by  the  Boston 
Finance  Commission: 

"The  poHtical  system  has  had  an  unrestricted 
field  in  county  affairs.  It  has  not  been  subject 
to  the  check  of  the  civil-service  rules.  Under 
the  Massachusetts  system  of  county  adminis- 
tration, the  county  organization  is  a  law  unto 
itself,  answerable  only  to  the  electorate  at  annual 
elections,  at  which  time  it  is  seldom  found  neces- 
sary to  offer  detailed  explanations.  In  counties 
other  than  Suffolk,  county  commissions  have 
built  up  machines,  sometimes  independent  and 
sometimes  in  connection  with  other  important 
political  influences.  'County  Rings'  are  no- 
torious as  dominant  political  factors,  and  some- 
times as  profligate  spenders  of  the  people's 
money  for  poHtical  ends.     Occasionally  condi- 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     141 

tions  have  become  noxious  and  reforms  have 
been  demanded  and  secured.  But,  as  a  rule, 
the  poHtical  power  of  the  county  organization 
has  been  used  to  make  that  power  self-per- 
petuating. 

"In  Suffolk  County  the  powers  of  the  county 
commission  have  been  vested  in  the  city  coun- 
cil of  Boston.  The  county  has  been  a  useful 
political  adjunct  to  the  municipal  machine. 
Extensive  as  has  been  the  field  for  political 
manipulation  offered  by  the  ramifications  of  the 
municipal  administration,  it  has  not  been  equal 
to  the  demands  made  upon  it  by  the  politicians. 
The  county,  with  its  annual  expenditure  of 
^1,000,000,  subject  to  no  review  save  that 
which  the  city  council  might  make,  has  offered 
a  rare  opportunity  for  the  payment  of  political 
debts.  The  finance  commission  indicates  clearly 
how  this  has  been  done.  Appropriations  are 
made  upon  estimates  furnished  by  the  city 
auditor.  His  sources  of  information,  furnishing 
the  basis  for  such  estimates,  are  the  requests  of 
certain  county  officials  or  the  expenditures  of 
previous  years.  It  is  not  apparent  that  needs 
and  desires  are  ever  compared  to  determine 
the  accuracy  of  estimates.    Methods  of  expend- 


142 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 


ing  appropriations  are  seldom  watched  or  made 
a  subject  of  inquiry.  There  is  no  check  upon  the 
increase  of  salaries  or  the  creation  of  new  offices. 
In  twelve  years  the  number  of  employees  has 
more  than  doubled,  with  similar  increases  in 
salaries.  Log-rolling  methods  have  increased 
salaries  $82,202.33  ^^  ^^^^  years.  The  system 
has  been  a  standing  invitation  to  trades  with 
members  of  the  Boston  board  of  aldermen  for 
positions  for  favorites  in  exchange  for  county 
positions.  County  officials,  if  not  willing  parties 
to  such  trades,  have  been  held  up  with  threats 
of  reduced  appropriations 

"The  application  of  civil-service  laws  to 
county  administration,  the  creation  of  a  series 
of  checks  upon  and  reviews  of  county  expendi- 
tures, and  the  requirement  of  actual  estimates 
of  need  as  a  basis  for  appropriations,  as  suggested 
by  the  finance  commission,  will  accomplish  some 
reforms.  Mayor  Hibbard's  prompt  summons  to 
the  committee  on  county  accounts  may  be  of 
some  avail.  But  the  interests  of  the  taxpayers 
in  other  counties,  as  well  as  in  Suffolk,  require 
that  some  far-reaching  reorganization  of  the 
system  of  county  administration  be  effected." 

Such  is  the  county  machine  in  one  State  as 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE    143 

described  by  the  Finance  Commission.     It  is 
merely  one  individual  of  a  species. 

Dissipation  of  responsibility  is  a  more  elaborate 
and  artistic  contrivance  than  multiplication  of- — 
offices.    I  do  not  know  whether  I  have  made  this 
point  entirely  plain.     In  an  industrial  State  in' 
which  a  vast  amount  of  money  is  spent  on  pubHc  \      y 
works  of  all  kinds,  patronage  does  not  mean  i  ^ 
merely  offices,  but  money  paid  out  under  con-  \ 
tract.    Now,  there  is  no  doubt  that  division  of 
responsibiHty    promotes    the    disbursement    of 
money  in  a  great  number  of  ways.    If  there  is  a 
board  of  four  men  who  have  the  disbursement  of   \    \ 
B.  million,  so  long  as  they  act  as  a  body,  and  each 
is  under  a  real  political  responsibiHty  for  the 
other,  they  are  not  likely  to  be  wasteful.    But 
if  you  divide  the  responsibiHty  and  give  to  each 
member  of  the  board  the  spending  of  $250,000, 
with  the  understanding  that  what  one  does  all 
do,  it  is  surprising  how  fast  the  money  will  dis- 
appear.   Thus,  one  of  the  natural  results  of  a 
division  of  spoils  is  a  dissipation  of  responsibiHty. 
It  is  obvious  that  each  member  of  the  board  is 
entitled  to  patronage  to  the  extent  of  $250,000, 
and  when  it  is  what  is   called   a   bi-partisan 
board,  in  no  other  way  can  the  party  balance  be 


^^ 


w 


144         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

maintained.  So  dissipation  of  responsibility  Is 
born  of  patronage.  By  carrying  the  matter  a 
little  further  and  establishing  what  is  graphically 
termed  a  "rake-ofF,"  expenditure  may  be  still 
further  accelerated;  but  we  must  be  careful  not 
to  go  too  far,  for  we  are  touching  on  delicate 
ground;  prudent  "organization  men"  are  care- 
ful never  to  expose  themselves  to  the  charge 
of  a  breach  of  the  criminal  law.  A  failure  to 
notice  the  importance  of  this  rule  has  given 
members  of  some  ''rings"  much  trouble;  en- 
lightened politicians,  as  can  be  seen  by  the 
testimony  of  Mr.  Croker,  quoted  above,  have 
learned  how  to  enjoy  the  fruits  of  corruption 
without  the  risk  of  indictment.  Their  protected 
system  has  enriched  the  language  with  an  illu- 
minating phrase,  "honest  graft."  The  machine 
allots  the  offices  and  provides  the  votes  which 
decide  who  shall  fill  them,  and  this  it  does  upon 
a  tacit  understanding  that  it  is  to  have  an 
interest  in  the  distribution  of  the  patronage. 
Translate  this  into  terms  of  contract  and  day's 
labor,  and  you  will  see  at  once  why  the  cities 
and  local  public  works  supply  the  life  blood  of 
the  electoral  machine  of  our  day,  exactly  as  the 
custom-houses  and  the  navy-yards  and  the  post- 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     145 

office  and  the  federal  departments  made  the 
federal  civil  service  a  by-word  a  generation 
ago. 

Details  of  machine  misgovernment  are  as 
various  as  those  of  the  government  on  which  it 
preys,  and  it  is  idle  to  attempt  a  study  of  them 
except  with  power  from  the  state  to  "send  for 
persons  and  papers."  Its  work  is  secret  and 
the  secrets  are  not  told,  because  secrecy  is  one 
of  the  sources  of  its  power.  There  are  rings, 
and  rings  within  rings.  Then,  too,  a  machine 
powerful  to-day  may  disintegrate  to-morrow, 
owing  to  the  death  or  retirement  of  its  head. 
In  the  perfected  machine,  however,  of  which 
Tammany  is  the  type,  this  never  occurs.  Tam- 
many without  a  boss  is  as  impossible  as  a  king- 
dom without  a  king.  Business  is  managed  as 
it  was  at  Rome,  through  popular  forms,  the 
mayor,  the  presidents  of  the  boroughs,  the  legis- 
lative body  (which  passes  no  laws);  but  the 
process  is  arranged  by  the  head  and  his  real  co- 
adjutors behind  closed  doors.  The  results  we 
know,  and  are  not  in  the  dark  as  to  cause  and 
effect.  Mutatis  mutandis,  it  is  the  same  in  all 
machine-governed  territory.  The  state  machine 
is  not  different  in  kind,  but  it  has  a  different 


146         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

field  of  operations.  What  a  state  machine  exists 
for  may  be  seen  in  the  struggle  of  Governor 
Hughes  with  the  New  York  machine.  Governor 
Hughes  announced  himself  as  opposed  to  sham 
responsibiUty,  to  a  dissipation  of  responsibility. 
"I  am  the  responsible  Executive  of  my  State," 
this  extraordinarily  obstinate  man  declared, 
"made  so  by  the  Constitution.  To  whom  am 
I  responsible?  Can  I  be  so  for  power  which 
others  control?"  This  is  called  "kicking  over 
the  traces." 

The  merit  system  in  this  country,  though  not 
yet  completely  introduced,  has,  as  far  as  the  civil 
""^  V^  service  is  concerned,  paved  the  way  for  dislodg- 
ing the  electoral  machine.  When  all  the  fourth- 
class  postmasters,  who  are  the  principal  remains 
of  the  old  system,  are  brought  within  the  new, 
and  the  system  has  stood  the  test  of  a  change  of 
parties,  patronage  will  play  no  more  part  in  this 
service,  and  government  clerks  will  be  no  more 
bled  for  election  expenses  here  than  they  are 
in  England.  The  civil  service  of  the  government 
will  have  been  taken  out  of  "poHtics"  and 
placed  on  the  basis  on  which  any  successful 
private  business  is  carried  on.  And  what  is 
true  of  the  federal  civil  service  is  also  true  of  the 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     147 

civil-service  system  in  States  and  cities,  so  far 
as  it  is  applied. 

But  supposing  the  civil  service  to  be  entirely 
free  from  patronage  to-day,  the  electoral  nom- 
inating machine  would  be  still  in  operation 
throughout  the  whole  elective  system,  and  the 
problem  now  before  us  is  whether  we  can  find 
a  means  of  getting  rid  of  that.  For,  if  there  is 
anything  in  the  teachings  of  experience,  the  ma- 
chine as  it  exists  to-day  is  as  full  of  poison  as 
the  civil  service  ever  was. 

If  the  view  of  the  subject  which  I  have  at- 
tempted to  outline  be  correct,  there  is  no  way  to 
get  rid  of  the  machine  except  through  giving  up 
the  delusion  that  the  multiplication  of  offices 
and  elections  is  the  way  to  enforce  responsibility 
to  the  people  or  that  they  can  do  anything  but 
intensify  the  evil.    We  have  got  to  retrace  our 
steps  and  face  the  fact  that  popular  government 
can  get  responsibility  only  through  a  very„s£ar-  - 
ing  us^of  elective  machinery,  and  by  relying  \ 
mainly  on  tenure,  responsibility  centred  in  a  1 
single  head,  and  emoluments  of  office  adequate 
to  make  it  attractive  to  the  best  and  most  fit. 
In  other  words,  the  road  to  good  government 
lies  through  the  simplification  of  political  ma- 


148         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

chinery.  If  any  one  says  that  this  is  a  dream 
of  perfection,  I  emphatically  deny  it,  and  advise 
those  who  think  it  so  to  read  the  history  of  the 
struggles  by  which  the  civil-service  law  was 
introduced  and  what  was  accomplished  in  the 
teeth  of  the  indifference  or  jeers  of  a  great  part 
of  the  press,  and  the  bitter  and  obstinate  op- 
position of  almost  every  leading  politician  in 
the  country,  by  the  efforts  of  three  men,  one 
of  whom  was  the  writer  in  whose  honor  this 
chair  was  founded. 

The  evils  of  machine  government  are  pretty 
generally  recognized,  as  is  the  necessity  of  doing 
something  about  them.  The  current  remedies 
proposed  may  be  said  to  come  under  two  heads. 

First,  the  popular  election  of  senators,  on  the 
theory  that  the  election  by  the  legislature  (the 
latter  being  more  or  less  in  the  hands  of  the  ma- 
chine) produces  senators  who  are  the  creatures 
of  the  machine — who  hold  their  offices  at  its 
pleasure  and  are  not  really  responsible  to  the 
State  sending  them  to  Washington.  This  reform 
requires  a  constitutional  amendment,  though 
the  difficulty  may  for  the  time  be  got  over  by 
any  State  legislature,  which  wishes  to  introduce 
the  change,  binding  itself  to  send  to  Washington 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     149 

any  candidate  who  appears  by  a  preliminary  vote 
to  have  the  majority  of  the  party  vote  behind 
him. 

Second,  the  direct  primary  is  advocated,  i.  <?., 
direct  voting  in  the  primary  for  candidates, 
thus  doing  away  with  the  delegate  convention, 
which  is  now  usually  the  scene  of  the  most  de- 
cisive operations  of  the  machine. 

Both  these  reforms  are  open  to  the  criticism 
that  they  are  founded  upon  the  idea  with  ref- 
erence to  democratic  machinery  which  I  have 
ventured  to  call  the  democratic  mistake;  that 
is,  that  whenever  and  under  whatever  cir- 
cumstances you  want  to  secure  responsibility 
to  the  people,  the  only  way  is  by  a  popular 
vote. 

If  this  view  is  correct,  we  might  expect  to  find 
that  the  proposed  reforms,  so  far  as  they  have 
been  introduced,  have  not  proved  entirely  satis- 
factory, and  that  seems  to  be  the  case.  I  find 
the  plan  of  direct  nominations  thus  summed  up 
in  a  quarter  very  unfriendly  to  machine  govern- 
ment: 

Direct  nominations  are  still  in  the  experi- 
mental stage.  In  Mississippi,  Georgia,  South 
CaroHna,  and  elsewhere  in  the  South,  complaint 


150         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

is  made  that  the  Populists  vote  at  the  Demo- 
cratic primaries  and  that  by  holding  the  balance 
of  power  between  two  Democratic  factions  they 
can  often  dictate  the  Democratic  nominations, 
which  are  equivalent  to  an  election. 

In  Missouri  this  year,  although  a  majority  of 
the  Democratic  legislators  favor  Folk  for  Sena- 
tor, Stone  had  a  plurality  in  the  popular  vote 
and  will  succeed  himself.  In  this  case,  the  pri- 
mary system  of  selecting  Senators  has  accom- 
plished the  exact  opposite  of  what  its  friends 
claimed  for  it. 

In  Oregon  a  Republican  legislature  is  asked 
to  elect  a  Democratic  United  States  Senator 
because  Governor  Chamberlain  was  success- 
ful at  the  State  senatorial  election.  In  Wis- 
consin the  charge  is  made  that  Senator  Stephen- 
son's victory  was  won  by  the  use  of  money. 
Michigan  and  Illinois  have  proved  that  the 
machine,  under  the  primary  system  can  retain 
the  advantage  it  had  under  the  convention 
system,  and  in  Michigan  both  Republican  fac- 
tions charged  gross  irregularities  in  the  vote  for 
Governor. 

The  direct  primary  means  two  elections,  one 
of  which  has  to  be  paid  for  by  the  candidates 
themselves.  This  makes  it  very  difficult  for  a 
poor  man  to  gain  a  nomination  unless  he  happens 
to  have  an  overwhelming  personal  popularity  or 
a  rich  backer.  If  left  to  his  own  resources  he 
cannot  pay  the  heavy  expenses  of  the  prelimi- 
nary canvass,  which  involves  railroad  fare,  hotel 
bills,  hall  rent,  advertising,  etc.     In  the  recent 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE      151 

Detroit  election  it  was  estimated  that  the  pri- 
maries cost  the  various  candidates  no  less  than 
^250,000. 

A  nominating  system  under  which  men  like 
Woodruff,  Barnes,  Ward,  Connors,  Murphy,  and 
McCarren  can  name  the  candidate  is  bad;  yet 
nothing  will  be  gained  if  the  State  substitutes  a 
system  which  means  practically  two  elections 
and  still  leaves  the  control  of  nominations  in  the 
hands  of  the  bosses. 

In  other  words,  the  system  is  more  compli- 
cated than  the  old,  which  it  is  introduced  to 
simpHfy.^ 

In  the  early  city  states  of  Greece,  the  people 
managed  everything  directly  through  a  popular 
vote.  But  whatever  virtues  the  principle  had  in 
it  when  in  use  in  very  small  communities,  it  has 
absolutely  failed  to  work  in  large  communities, 
and  to  judge  by  our  own  experience  the  direct 
primary  will  have  the  fate  that  the  convention 
system  itself  had — it  will  at  first  tend  to  pop- 
ularize nominations — that  is,  make  them  more 
accessible  to  popular  influence — but  later  on  it 
will,  through  its  complexity,  increase  the  power 
of  the  machine.  The  fundamental  difficulty  will 
always  be  that  no  one  but  the  professional  poli- 

» I  do  not  see  anything  in  the  presidential  campaign  of  1912  to 
call  for  any  modification  of  this  view. 


152         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ticians  and  their  henchmen,  the  **  workers,"  have 
the  time  to  devote  to  picking  out  candidates 
and  organizing  the  forces  of  the  party.  The  in- 
evitable result  is  that  these  professionals  and 
workers  do  these  things  while  the  others  pay  the 
expenses. 

As  already  suggested,  it  is  in  another  quarter, 
according  to  my  belief,  that  we  must  look  for 
signs  of  improvement.  Responsibility  to  the 
people  does  not  necessarily  mean,  so  far  as  the 
actual  operation  of  the  government  goes,  re- 
sponsibility at  short  intervals  to  a  popular  vote. 
It  means  answerability  somewhere  for  the  per- 
formance of  the  duties  imposed  by  the  people 
upon  the  incumbent,  tested  solely  by  the  result. 
Now  this  responsibility  is  not  increased  by  any 
increase  in  the  number  of  officials;  and  it  is 
greatly  diminished  by  the  frequency  of  elections, 
and  in  the  shortening  of  the  terms  of  office.  On 
the  other  hand,  responsibility  increases  with  a 
reduction  in  the  number  of  officials  and  elections, 
and  the  lengthening  of  the  term  of  office.  The 
same  causes  which  produce  one  or  other  of  these 
effects  increase  or  diminish  respectively  the 
power  of  the  machine  by  taking  away  from  it  its 
occupation.    If  all  the  powers  of  the  government 


PATRONAGE  AND  THE  MACHINE     153 

of  the  State  of  New  York  were,  after  full  discus- 
sion, vested  in  a  commission  of  five  men  for  ten 
years,  by  a  popular  vote,  it  is  obvious  that  dur- 
ing this  time  the  State  machine  would  find  its 
occupation  gone.  This  is  an  extreme  case,  but 
it  is  an  illustration  showing  the  direction  in 
which  alone  the  powers  of  the  machine  can  be 
successfully  undermined. 

It  is  in  quarters  in  which  the  operation  of  the 
machine  is  most  vicious  and  oppressive  that  one 
might  expect  to  see  the  first  signs  of  some  effec- 
tive contrivance  to  counteract  it.  This  is  con- 
spicuously the  case  with  city  government.  A 
triumphant  Tammany  Hall  would  represent  the 
destruction  of  popular  government.  The  same 
system  is  at  work  everywhere,  but  it  is  only 
within  recent  years  that  the  disease  and  its 
causes  have  been  studied.  The  result  has  been 
the  discovery  that  the  worst  of  the  malady  lay 
in  the  complexity  introduced  by  exclusive  re- 
liance on  frequent  elections  to  secure  responsi- 
bility, and  the  only  remedy  hitherto  tried  with 
any  success  has  been  a  substitution  for  the  old 
municipal  regime,  with  its  wards,  and  districts, 
and  councilmen,  aldermen,  and  mayor,  of  govern- 
ment by  a  single-headed  commission;    that  is, 


154         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

turning  over  the  city  bodily  to  a  small  body  of 
men  vested  with  most  of  the  powers  of  govern- 
ment, but  subject  to  the  power  which  clothes 
them  with  these  powers — that  is,  the  commu- 
nity itself.  This  has  as  yet  been  tried  thoroughly 
only  in  some  comparatively  small  cities,  but  the 
nature  of  the  cure  is  not  dependent  on  the  size 
of  the  city. 

The  history  of  the  government  of  the  City  of 
New  York  during  the  last  fifty  years  is  that  of  a 
struggle,  on  the  one  hand,  to  simplify  the  gov- 
ernment of  the  chief  commercial  city  of  the 
country  by  lengthening  tenure — the  mayor  has 
now  a  tenure  as  long  as  that  of  the  president  of 
the  United  States — through  making  responsi- 
bility in  heads  of  executive  departments  single 
instead  of  divided,  wherever  possible;  by  increas- 
ing salaries,  by  getting  the  city  civil  service  out 
of  politics,  and  making  its  tenure  depend  upon 
merit;  on  the  other  hand,  to  strengthen  the 
hold  of  the  machine  through  the  legislature  at 
Albany  and  through  a  rigid  control  of  nomina- 
tions. The  legislative  control  at  Albany  has, 
of  course,  always  complicated  and  still  greatly 
complicates  the  problem. 


LECTURE  V 
LIMITATIONS 


LIMITATIONS 

The  theory  of  checks  and  balances  has  fallen 
into  discredit,  partly  because  it  has  been  mis- 
understood; partly  because  it  has  not  worked 
altogether  as  was  expected;  partly  also  because 
the  study  of  the  operation  of  government  as  a 
human  contrivance  for  the  attainment  of  defi- 
nite ends  by  means  of  the  deliberate  use  of  will 
and  motive  has  been  in  a  sort  of  eclipse;  partly 
owing  in  this  country  to  the  mistaken  idea  that 
we  had  solved  the  problem  of  popular  govern- 
ment once  for  all  by  means  of  continuous  uni- 
versal suffrage.  Now  that  it  is  beginning  to  be 
perceived  that  this  tends  to  produce  cumbrous 
and  irresponsible  government,  and  to  pervert 
popular  into  machine  government,  interest  in 
the  subject  seems  likely  to  be  revived. 

Checks  and  balances  are  as  old  as  Athens  and 
Rome,  and  are  founded  on  a  very  simple  prin- 
ciple which  is  as  old  as  government  itself.  The 
principle  is  that  in  pubHc  affairs  the  love  of 
power  is  a  constant  motive  to  increase  power;  that 
157 


158         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

power  always  tends,  unchecked,  to  become  un- 
limited, or,  in  other  words,  arbitrary;  and  hence 
to  check  it  some  counterbalancing  tendency 
must  be  called  into  play. 

Writers  on  government,  in  this  case  as  in  so 
many  others,  have  no  doubt  pressed  a  familiar 
tendency  too  far.  It  is  not  true  as  a  universal 
principle  that  all  power  succeeds  in  aggrandiz- 
ing itself.  There  are  many  famihar  instances  of 
power  which  with  time  has  grown  less.  The 
patria  potestas,  which  was  a  primitive  absolute 
dominion  of  the  father  as  the  head  of  the  family, 
including  power  of  life  and  death,  has  dwindled 
until,  even  in  countries  deriving  their  laws  from 
Rome,  it  is  hardly  more  than  a  mild  control 
carefully  supervised  by  the  courts.  It  was  once 
thought  to  be  the  duty  of  a  good  judge  to  "am- 
plify'* his  jurisdiction.  Such  a  practice  now 
would  be  with  us  an  impeachable  offence.  The 
temporal  power  of  the  Catholic  Church,  after 
expanding  and  increasing  for  centuries,  has  come 
down  to  very  modest  proportions.  In  these 
cases,  other  causes  have  been  brought  into  play 
to  counteract  the  tendency.  Irresponsible  and 
uncontrolled  power  always  tends  to  increase  and 
extend  itself,  for  the  simple  reason  that  it  is  irre- 


LIMITATIONS  159 

sponsible.  A  priori  it  must  do  so,  because  the 
desire  of  human  beings  for  power  is  iUimitable 
and,  Hke  any  other  passion,  grows  by  what  it 
feeds  on.  Experience  teaches  the  same  lesson 
in  the  history  of  every  despotism,  and  of  every 
mob,  once  free  from  the  control  of  law,  and  of 
every  unfettered  aristocracy.  Make  the  pos- 
sessor of  the  power  responsible  for  his  acts,  and 
enforce  the  responsibility  by  practicable  means, 
and  the  tendency  to  expansion  is  stopped,  and 
either  the  power  remains  constant — as,  for  in- 
stance, in  the  case  in  this  country  of  the  ordinary 
judicial  power — or  even  may,  under  the  influ- 
ence of  other  causes,  diminish. 

In  all  popular  governments  it  is  considered  de- 
sirable to  control  the  tendency  to  aggrandize- 
ment, and  it  may  be  done  in  two  ways:  first, 
that  which  we  have  been  considering,  making 
the  person  who  exercises  the  power  responsible, 
i,e,y  answerable,  for  its  abuse;  second,  by  limit- 
ing the  power  itself  in  some  way.  One  of  the 
most  obvious  ways  of  doing  it  is  that  suggested 
by  nature  and  history,  i.  e.y  the  opposition  to  it 
of  some  other  power  which  will  balance  it  and 
hold  it  in  check.  As  in  the  early  world,  and  in- 
deed down  to  very  recent  times,  there  always 


>^. 


i6o         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

appeared  to  be  three  mighty  forms  which  po- 
Htical  power  took,  engaged  in  an  endless  struggle 
for  the  mastery,  it  seemed  fair  to  infer  that  a 
true  function  of  each  might  be  to  hold  in  check 
the  other  two,  and  this  result  was  thought  to 
have  been  reached  in  the  English  constitution, 
in  a  nice  balance  between  the  Crown,  the  Aris- 
tocracy, and  the  People.  Unfortunately,  if  the 
balance  is  estabHshed  by  accidental  causes,  and 
I  not  by  design,  it  may  be  very  unstable.  If  it  is 
only  a  fortuitous  balance  between  class  interests, 
there  is  no  reason  why  one  class  interest  should 
not  swallow  up  another.  At  any  rate,  this  is 
what  has  happened  in  England,  the  House  of 
Commons  having  encroached  until  it  and  the 
electorate  behind  it  have  destroyed  the  balance 
and  established  what  English  writers  like  Maine 
hold  to  be  a  close  approach  to  simple  democracy. 
The  complaint  is  constantly  heard  in  England 
now,  that  our  constitution  is  more  conservative 
than  theirs.  In  American  governments  the 
theory  of  the  balance  between  the  three  forms 
of  government  was  out  of  place,  because  their 
whole  framework  rested  on  the  sovereignty  of 
the  people,  and  a  much  more  elaborate  system 
of  Hmitations  was  set  up   than   any  hitherto 


LIMITATIONS  i6i 

dreamed  of.  It  involves  not  merely  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  three  departments,  which  are 
balanced  against  each  other,  but  the  balance  of 
the  States  against  the  Federal  government,  and 
the  executive  against  the  Senate,  the  Senate 
against  the  House.  Supreme  above  all  is  put  the 
judiciary,  which  limits  all  power,  though  in  itself 
having  none  except  what  the  executive  must 
furnish;  all  judicial  decrees  and  judgments  be- 
ing carried  into  effect  by  some  branch  of  the 
executive. 

In  this  scheme  may  be  seen  the  germ  of  a  new 
principle  till  recently  not  hitherto  much  con- 
sidered, but  destined  apparently  to  rise  to  great 
importance.  Translate  the  old  dispute  between 
Monarchy,  Aristocracy,  and  Democracy  into  the 
terms  of  modern  industrial  society  as  we  know 
it,  without  heredity,  privilege,  or  prescription  of 
any  kind,  and  what  does  it  become?  In  the 
answer  to  this  question,  I  think,  lies  an  explana- 
tion of  much  of  the  ferocious  criticism  formerly 
directed  against  the  Federalists  as  "monarch- 
ists." 

The  Federalists  differed  from  the  Republicans 
and  leaders  Hke  Jefferson  in  taking  a  purely 
practical  view  of  government,  untinged  by  sen- 


i62         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

timentality  or  speculation;  most  of  them  were 
men  of  affairs,  and  in  many  cases  large  property 
owners,  accustomed  to  the  management  of  men 
and  business.  In  their  eyes  the  old  dispute,  as 
suggested  in  the  last  lecture,  came  to  have 
another  meaning,  i.  e.,  What  functions  of  this 
government  will  best  be  discharged  by  one  man? 
What  by  a  few  men?  What  by  many?  What 
by  this  branch  of  the  government,  what  by 
that?  Put  in  this  way,  the  answer  was  neces- 
sarily: That  depends  on  the  nature  of  the  func- 
tion. 

Now  upon  analysis  it  turns  out  that  the  most 
conspicuous  functions  which  we  call  executive, 
and  which  in  the  older  world  were  vested  in  an 
hereditary  king,  were  vested  in  him,  not  wholly 

v/  , by  accident,  but  also  because  they  were  of  the 

'  kind  to  be  performed  by  one  man.  The  kingly 
office  answered  for  ages,  because,  as  we  should 
say,  it  constituted  a  strong  executive.  The  ju- 
dicial office,  which  the  Athenians  vested  in  a 
multitude,  experience  shows  to  be  best  exercised 
by  experts  in  law,  few  in  number;  the  judiciary 
the  founders  of  the  American  State  accordingly 
made  a  select  body.  The  problem  as  to  the 
legislature  and  the  electorate  they  left  where 


LIMITATIONS  163 

they  found  it — in  the  hands  of  the  many,  gov- 
erning by  representation.^ 

What  the  American  Federal  Constitution  did 
was  really  to  introduce  to  the  modern  world  a 
new  view  of  the  whole  subject,  which  may  be 
summed  up  by  saying  that  in  the  operation  of 
government  all  contrivances  are  designed,  among 
other  things,  to  answer  the  questions:  In  what 
functions  of  government  is  the  action  of  one 

*  In  Europe  the  struggle  of  the  three  forms  continued  for  two 
generations;  as  late  as  the  middle  of  the  last  century  it  was  still 
believed  that  the  one  potent  cause  which  explained  all  the  phe- 
nomena of  politics  was  the  form  of  government.  To  put  the 
matter  in  a  different  way,  it  is  not  merely  the  fact  that  the  sover- 
eignty may  be  in  the  hands  of  one  man,  or  a  few  men,  or  of  the 
general  body  of  the  community,  that  is  important;  it  is  a  vital 
fact  also  that  every  function  of  government  is  performed  either 
by  one  man,  or  by  a  few  men,  or  a  large  number.  This  is  not  the 
difference  between  monarchy,  aristocracy,  and  democracy,  but 
a  practical  question  of  observation  and  experience.  Experience 
shows,  for  instance,  that  the  responsibility  of  a  court  for  the  trial 
of  cases  is  usually  at  its  best  if  it  consists  of  one  judge,  but  this 
does  not  make  a  trial  court  consisting  of  a  trial  judge  a  mon- 
archical institution.  A  court  of  appeal  always  is  made  to  consist  of 
a  number  of  judges,  but  this  does  not  make  even  the  Supreme 
Court  at  Washington  a  privileged  aristocracy.  Our  executive  is 
one  man  (we  might  have  had  two,  as  they  had  consuls  at  Rome); 
but  this  does  not  make  him  a  king.  The  test  is  in  the  sovereignty. 
If  that  is  popular,  i.  e.,  if  the  effective  power  of  initiating,  carrying 
on,  and  changing  lies  in  the  people,  then  you  have  a  republic.  But, 
under  all  forms  of  government,  certain  functions  will  be  found  to 
work  in  the  same  way,  and  to  fall  naturally  into  the  hands  of  one, 
a  few,  or  many.  To  take  an  extreme  instance,  from  time  im- 
memorial the  regular  representative  of  a  country  abroad  has 
been  a  single  man.    It  is  almost  proverbial  that  three  men  or  two 


1 64         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

man  best  ?  How  long  shall  power  be  held  ?  How 
shall  responsibility  be  secured?  In  what  func- 
tions by  that  of  a  few  men  ?  In  what  by  that  of 
many?  The  Republicans  made  out  only  that  a 
constitutional  president  was  a  Federalist  sub- 
stitute for  a  king,  and  denounced  their  oppo- 
nents as  "monarchists." 

But  the  system  would  not  be  complete  with- 
out some  contrivance  to  set  limits  to  the  bound- 
men  cannot  do  it  as  well,  if  at  all;  this  was  tried  at  the  time  of 
the  Revolution  and  was  a  signal  failure.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
work  of  legislation  has  always  in  the  long  run  been  found  to  re- 
quire a  numerous  body;  because  what  is  needed  in  a  legislature 
or  constitutional  convention  is  representation  and  debate,  for 
debate,  it  must  always  be  remembered,  is  a  function  of  govern- 
ment just  as  much  as  action.  Experience  shows  that  the  head  of 
an  army  must  be  one  man;  a  council  of  war  never  fights.  These 
questions  in  early  times  were  not  studied  nor  attended  to;  ten 
generals  for  an  army  was  not  in  Greece  thought  an  absurdity. 
One  reason  why  the  battle  between  the  three  forms  raged  so  hotly 
from  the  time  of  the  revival  of  learning  almost  to  the  present  day 
was,  if  I  am  right,  purely  intellectual.  It  was  really  believed  that 
the  form  of  government  was  a  decisive  cause  which  produced  bad 
or  good  government  of  itself.  Believers  in  a  Monarchy  or  Aris- 
tocracy looked  upon  Democracy  once  adopted  as  a  thing  fatal  to 
whatever  was  worth  preserving  in  the  State,  and  vice  versa. 
But  behind  this  there  was  the  fact  that  the  principle  of  heredity 
in  privilege, which  was  practically  universalovcrEurope,was  really 
an  abridgment  of  freedom,  and  the  question  of  the  form  of  gov- 
ernment was  confounded  with  this.  It  was  not  until  privilege 
as  the  basis  of  society  was  finally  driven  off  the  field  by  equality 
of  opportunity,  and  universal  suffrage  recognized  as  the  power 
behind  the  throne  of  the  common  welfare,  that  it  was  suddenly 
perceived  that  the  old  struggle  of  the  three  forms  belonged  to  the 
past. 


LIMITATIONS  165 

aries  of  the  powers  delegated  to  one  man,  to  a 
few  men,  and  to  the  many;  and  this  contrivance 
was  found  in  the  relation  of  the  judiciary  to  the 
other  two;  and  that  they  might  perform  this 
novel  function,  never  before  deliberately  in- 
trusted to  human  beings,  they  were  given  a  ten- 
ure of  office  for  life,  so  that  they  are  to-day  the 
permanent  and  supreme  part  of  our  system, 
outlasting  presidents,  and  governors,  and  con- 
gresses, and  legislatures. 

It  is  a  commonplace  of  American  constitu- 
tional law  that  the  federal  government  is  one  of 
delegated  powers.  Had  this  merely  meant  that 
the  States  had  created  a  federal  political  agency 
and  devolved  upon  it  powers  which  they  might 
otherwise  have  exercised  themselves  and  might 
at  any  time  resume,  there  would  have  been  little 
that  was  new  in  the  contrivance,  for,  as  I  have 
endeavored  to  show,  all  government  which  is 
not  carried  on  by  a  single  person  or  persons  in 
supreme  power  with  their  own  hands  must  be 
delegated.  Wherever  there  are  political  agents, 
judicial,  legislative,  or  administrative,  the  power 
they  exercise  is  delegated  to  them.  Represen- 
tation is  only  a  peculiar  and  refined  form  of  dele- 
gation;   its  importance  lies,  not  in  its  being  a 


1 66         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

novel  discovery  that  A,  B,  and  C  can  transact 
political  business  through  D,  their  agent,  at  a 
distance,  but  that  through  this  contrivance  the 
whole  legislative  business  of  a  community  can 
be  transacted  at  a  distant  centre  through  elec- 
tive machinery,  thus  making  free  institutions 
possible  throughout  immense  areas  and  for  great 
populations — in  primitive  times  an  almost  in- 
conceivable idea.  That  representation  is  at  bot- 
tom only  a  kind  of  delegation  is  seen  only  too 
clearly  to-day  in  the  fact  that,  owing,  among 
other  causes,  to  the  extraordinary  facilities  for 
communication,  representatives  tend  to  become 
mere  delegates,  acting  under  instructions  from 
their  constituents  without  liberty  of  choice. 

In  the  government  of  the  United  States,  the 
peculiarity  lying  behind  the  phrase,  **a  govern- 
ment of  delegated  powers,"  is  the  one  just  ad- 
verted to — that  our  Constitution  leaves  it  to  the 
judicial  power  to  interpret  the  instrument  con- 
ferring the  powers  and  determine  how  far  they 
extend.  This  is  perhaps  our  greatest  contribu- 
tion to  the  development  of  free  institutions,  and 
it  is  a  contrivance  practically  unknown  to  the 
experience  of  the  rest  of  the  world.  It  is  em- 
bodied in  our  State  constitutions  also,  and  it  is 


LIMITATIONS  167 

what  gives,  under  our  system,  their  great  im- 
portance and  authority  to  the  courts,  placing 
them,  for  the  single  purpose  of  maintaining  the 
limits  of  power  in  the  Constitution,  above  the 
executive  and  above  the  legislature.  That  this 
was  the  necessary  effect  of  the  Constitution  as 
adopted  was  foreseen  and  explained  by  Hamil- 
ton, and  the  device  was  entrenched  in  our  sys- 
tem by  Marshall.  Though  in  a  long  view  of 
history  it  is  still  only  an  experiment,  it  has  sur- 
vived the  storms  of  a  century,  and,  if  we  may 
judge  by  what  is  going  on  about  us,  is  in  full 
vigor  to-day.  When  we  reflect  on  the  previous 
subordination  of  the  judicial  power  to  the 
Crown,  the  genius  of  the  men  who  grasped  the 
possibiHty  of  using  it  in  this  way  stands  out 
conspicuously.  The  judiciary  is  the  weakest  of 
all  the  departments  of  the  government.  It  pos- 
sesses no  physical  force  of  its  own  and  relies  on 
the  executive,  the  very  department  to  which  it 
had  hitherto  always  been  subservient,  for  phys- 
ical power  to  compel  obedience  to  its  decrees. 
What  it  cannot  compel  it  can  only  obtain  by  the 
appeal  to  reason  and  law  which  its  judgments 
make.  That  Hamilton  should  have  perceived 
that  an  independent,  responsible,  and  pure  bench 


1 68         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

would  in  the  long  run  command  the  compliance 
of  the  executive  and  the  legislature,  and  that  in 
this  way  the  fundamental  law  would  be  supreme, 
under  circumstances  far  different  from  any  that 
could  then  have  been  foreseen,  is  a  memorable 
illustration  of  insight  into  the  motives  which  de- 
termine the  operation  of  government.  Recall  the 
circumstances,  for  instance,  which  surrounded 
the  fierce  and  prolonged  struggle  between  An- 
drew Johnson  and  Congress,  following  on  the 
heels  of  a  long  civil  war,  which  had  enormously 
inflated  for  the  time  the  powers  of  the  executive, 
or  those  which  recently  marked  the  onslaught 
made  at  the  same  time  by  public  bodies  on  the 
elementary  rights  of  property.^  When  this  was 
at  its  height  and  a  decision  imposing  a  fine  of 
twenty-nine  millions  had  been  reversed  by  a 
federal  court  of  appeal,  one  of  the  judges  was 
asked  what  view  he  took  of  executive  expres- 
sions of  disapproval,  and  was  reported  to  have 
said  in  substance:  Expressions  of  opinion  on  the 
subject  by  the  President  do  not  concern  me. 
He  has  his  own  department  of  the  government 
to  administer;  I  have  mine.    What  he  thinks  of 

*  The  settled  rule  that  neither  Congress  nor  the  State  legis- 
lature can,  under  pretence  of  regulation,  pass  measures  of  confis- 
cation is  enforceable  solely  through  the  courts. 


LIMITATIONS  169 

our  interpretation  of  the  law  is  of  no  con- 
sequence, because  our  interpretation  of  the  law 
is  the  law  itself.  This  judge's  opinion  has  been 
reaffirmed.  The  President's  lease  of  power  has 
run  out. 

This  contrivance,  then,  is  our  fundamental 
limitation  of  the  powers  of  government,  and  it 
is  a  balanced  Hmitation.  It  checks  and  limits 
the  legislature  and  the  executive,  while  it  does 
not  tend  to  encroachment,  because  the  judiciary 
depends  for  its  power  on  the  executive,  and  for 
its  credit  mainly  on  the  persuasiveness  of  its 
judgments.  The  Dred  Scott  decision,  for  in- 
stance, did  not  persuade;  the  result  was  disas- 
trous to  the  Supreme  Court  as  then  constituted. 

The  amount  of  good  that  the  wisest  govern- 
ments have  done  in  their  attempts  to  amelior- 
ate the  condition  of  mankind  is  calculable;  what 
is  incalculable  and  almost  beyond  the  reach  of 
the  imagination  is  the  vast  power  for  harm  that 
the  agency  of  irresponsible  power  wields.  So 
prosperous  has  our  own  condition  been  that  we 
have  almost  forgotten  the  past  history  of  the 
world;  but  the  innate  power  and  potency  of 
government  for  evil,  hke  that  of  man,  is  what  it 
always  has  been.    The  power  to  tax,  it  has  been 


I70         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

very  truly  said  by  one  of  our  greatest  judges,  is 
the  power  to  destroy,  but  the  same  thing  may 
be  said  of  almost  all  the  powers  of  government. 
Except  so  far  as  they  are  restrained  by  human 
enlightenment  and  contrivance,  the  power  of  de- 
struction is  inherent  in  every  form  of  govern- 
ment, democracies,  aristocracies,  and  despot- 
isms. 

To  curb,  restrain,  and  limit  this  fatal  power 
has  been  the  great  effort  of  man  as  he  has  become 
civilized,  and  we  are  all  familiar  with  the  prin- 
ciples of  common  right  and  freedom  which  gov- 
ernments have  gradually  and  with  the  greatest 
difficulty  been  forced  to  admit.  Governments 
in  which  they  are  admitted  and  acted  upon  we 
call  free  and  constitutional  governments.  So 
slowly  has  the  work  been  done,  such  repeated 
lapses  into  barbarism  have  there  been,  so  tre- 
mendous has  been  the  resurgent  power  of  brute 
political  force  in  the  hands  of  ignorance,  super- 
stition, and  cruelty,  that  it  is  only  within  the  last 
one  hundred  and  fifty  years  that  we  have  be- 
come reasonably  secure  in  our  right  to  move 
about  and  change  our  place  of  abode  freely,  in 
our  right  to  carry  on  our  correspondence  with- 
out its  being  opened,  in  our  right  to  be  exempt 


LIMITATIONS  171 

from  having  soldiers  quartered  on  our  families 
in  time  of  profound  peace  and  from  having  our 
houses  searched  for  the  purpose  of  making  up  a 
case  against  us,  in  our  right  to  pubhsh  freely 
our  opinions  on  public  affairs.  And,  generally 
speaking,  all  these  gains  have  been  made  solely 
through  changes  in  public  opinion  and  the  law, 
and  as  they  have  been  made  so  they  may  be 
taken  away  again  by  other  means.  There  is  as 
much  potential  tyranny  in  a  popular  govern- 
ment as  in  any  other. 

Legal  limitation  of  power  by  human  design 
itself  is  therefore  an  important  addition  to  the 
theory  of  constitutional  government,  and  as  its 
principle  is  applicable  to  any  power,  it  is  natural 
to  find  it  applied  here  in  ways  never  before 
dreamed  of.  At  the  time  of  the  formation  of 
the  Constitution,  one  power  greatly  dreaded  was 
that  of  the  legislature,  and  this  was  limited  by 
the  veto^  in  one  direction  (that  is,  of  course,  an 
instance  of  the  use  of  the  power  of  the  executive 
to  hold  the  legislature  in  check)  and  by  several 
direct  Hmitations  of  power  intended  to  be  en- 
forced by  the  judiciary,  e.g.,  prohibiting  the  sus- 

1  The  post-adjournment  veto,  as  used  in  the  State  of  New  York, 
has  been  the  means  of  killing  hundreds,  if  not  thousands,  of  cor- 
rupt or  useless  measures. 


172         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

pension  of  the  habeas  corpus;  prohibiting  bills  of 
attainder,  and  ex  post  facto  laws;  prohibiting  any 
protective  system  between  the  States;  prohibit- 
ing States  from  entering  into  relations  with  for- 
eign powers,  coining  money,  impairing  the  obli- 
gation of  contracts;  prohibiting  Congress  from 
interfering  with  the  free  exercise  of  religion,  or 
establishing  any  religion,  or  from  abridging  the 
freedom  of  the  press,  of  speech,  and  of  assembly 
and  petition,  or  from  depriving  any  person  of 
life,  liberty,  or  property  without  due  process  of 
law.  Whether  in  the  long  run  such  limitations 
can  outride  the  storms  of  executive  or  popular 
passion  depends  upon  whether  there  is  a  power 
always  at  hand  to  enforce  them.  The  South 
Americans,  too,  introduce  "guarantees,"  as  they 
call  them,  of  the  same  sort  into  their  constitu- 
tions; but  they  are  not  enforced  by  the  courts, 
and  are  consequently  not  enforced  at  all  except 
when  it  is  considered  advisable  by  the  executive. 
They  may  be  suspended  by  proclamation. 

The  system  of  limitations  formally  introduced 
to  the  world  by  the  Federalist  has  been  our  sys- 
tem of  government  ever  since,  but  has  been 
much  extended.  One  of  the  most  familiar  in- 
stances is  the  adoption  of  the  fourteenth  amend- 


LIMITATIONS 


173 


ment  after  the  Civil  War,  by  which  the  States 
are  forbidden  to  deprive  any  person  of  Ufe, 
liberty,  or  property  without  due  process  of  law, 
as  Congress  had  been  forbidden  to  do  the  same 
thing  by  the  fifth  amendment.  The  original 
scheme  of  operation  has  been  little  changed,  but 
in  the  States,  where  amendments  are  more  easily 
passed,  the  powers  of  the  State  legislatures  have 
been  limited  in  a  very  remarkable  way  by  taking 
away  their  power  of  special  legislation,  with  a 
view  to  preventing  the  grant  of  special  privi- 
leges to  corporations  or  individuals.  Another 
important  modern  kind  of  limitation  is  that 
which  restricts  States,  towns,  counties,  and 
cities  from  incurring  debt  beyond  a  certain 
limit. 

On  the  whole,  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  sys- 
tem has  worked  for  anything  but  good;  does  it 
go  far  enough  ?  We  have  not  made  it  impossible 
for  States  to  repudiate  their  debts,  and  we  have 
not  limited  the  power  of  Congress  to  do  count- 
less wrongs  without  redress,  which  in  England 
and  on  the  continent  are  remedied  by  an 
ordinary  law  suit  against  the  government  itself. 
We  have  not  broken  up  the  absurd  system  by 
which  legislative  committees   decide  disputed 


vy 


174         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

elections  in  the  party  interest — in  England  this 
is  handed  over  to  the  courts — and  we  have  not 

/  brought  to  an  end  the  scandal  of  private  bill 
legislation,  but  the  fault  in  these  cases  is  ours. 
We  do  not  choose  to  cure  the  evil. 

Now,  there  are  three  points  with  regard  to 
this  which  seem  to  deserve  attention.  One  is 
that  all  these  checks  and  balances  and  limita- 
tions are  devices  for  curbing  that  irresponsibil- 
ity in  the  discharge  of  functions  confided  to 
political  agents,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  it  is  the 
misfortune  of  our  institutions  to  tend  at  other 
points  to  promote.  Universal  suffrage  finds  it 
difficult  to  get  together  a  legislature  such  as  our 
government  theoretically  demands — that  is,  an 
assembly  of  distinguished,  responsible  repre- 
sentatives— and  finding  itself  confronted  with 
an  irresponsible  body  Hmits  their  power  to  do 
mischief  by  resort  to  the  judiciary.    By  this 

I     means  the  limitation  is  enforced  and  responsibil- 
ity, so  far  as  it  can  be,  secured. 

The  second  is  that  a  check  on  the  irresponsible 
power  of  one  department  by  means  of  another 
becomes  worthless  the  moment  the  second  de- 
partment becomes  itself  irresponsible,  and  this 
it  may  become  either  through  usurpation  or  sub- 


LIMITATIONS  175 

servlence.  The  judiciary  with  us  has  shown 
little  or  no  tendency  to  usurpation,  but  it  may 
in  the  future  be  made  subservient.  Judges  are 
continually  urged  to  develop  the  constitution  by 
interpretation,  and  have  even  been  exhorted 
to  resort  to  what  is  called  "sociology,"  so  that 
laws  otherwise  unconstitutional  may  be  passed 
without  any  dread  of  their  being  set  aside.  In 
other  words,  the  suggestion  is  that  we  should 
introduce  a  totally  new  system  of  government 
by  means  wholly  illegal — the  Constitution  hav- 
ing provided  for  any  such  change  only  by  way 
of  amendment.  The  objection  to  this  is  that  it 
makes  Congress  supreme  and  destroys  the  limi- 
tation by  which  the  courts  are  set  above  the 
legislature.^ 

*  When  these  lectures  were  delivered,  the  suggestion  that  courts 
may  be  made  subservient  to  Congress  and  the  executive  by  means 
of  the  "recall"  of  judges,  or  decisions,  had  attracted  little  atten- 
tion. The  objection  to  the  "recall"  of  judges  by  popular  vote 
is  that  it  is  a  blow  at  the  individual  independence  of  the  judge. 
A  judge  subject  to  such  a  process  is  less  independent  than  if  his 
tenure  of  office  is  dependent  on  the  machine;  for  his  dismissal 
may  be  by  sudden  whim,  while  even  a  judge  who  has  secured  his 
nomination  from  a  "boss,"  holds  at  least  till  his  term  runs  out, 
or  until  he  is  removed  for  cause,  e,  g.,  by  impeachment.  If  the 
recall  or  dismissal  is  to  be  by  the  legislature,  such  a  dismissal  is 
practically  provided  for  already  in  existing  constitutions,  by  an 
orderly  representative  procedure.  The  difficulty  with  the  recall 
of  decisions  is  that  it  is  founded  on  a  confusion  between  a  judicial 
decision  or  judgment,  and  the  opinion  of  a  court.    A  judicial  de- 


176         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

The  third  and  most  important  point  is  that 
this  system  hinges  upon  the  integrity  and  au- 
thority of  the  judiciary,  and  is  good  or  bad  as 
the  judiciary  is  good  or  bad.     Hence,  it  ap- 

cision  or  judgment  is  generally  an  order,  or  command,  that  some- 
thing be  done  or  not  done;  e.  g.,  that  a  man  be  arrested,  that  his 
property  be  sold;  that  possession  of  land  or  other  property  be 
delivered;  an  act  be  not  done  or  attempted;  that  a  payment  be 
made.  A  decision  is  founded  on  reasons  which  are  sometimes 
stated  in  connection  with  the  judgment,  but  need  not  be.  In 
most  cases  of  first  instance,  or  original  trial,  they  are  not  stated 
at  all;  summary  decisions,  as  on  evidence,  in  the  course  of  a  trial 
are  generally  not  stated  at  all,  and  in  courts  of  appeal,  there  are 
multitudes  of  decisions,  f.  g.,  in  the  New  York  court  of  appeals, 
which  are  rendered,  on  the  judgment  below,  without  any  reasons 
being  given.  The  recall  of  a  decision  therefore  must  mean  either 
that  the  judgment  or  decree  is  to  be  cancelled,  or  that  the  opinion 
is  to  be  cancelled,  or  both.  If  opinions  were  to  be  cancelled,  the 
natural  result  would  be  for  judges  to  omit  to  give  any  reasons; 
which  would  tend  to  an  opportunity  for  greater  judicial  tyranny 
than  any  that  now  exists;  if  both  judgment  and  opinion  were  to 
be  reversed,  there  would  be  no  result  in  the  litigation,  and  con- 
fusion would  be  introduced  into  the  case;  if  judgments  were  to 
be  recalled,  the  same  confusion  would  be  introduced,  without  any 
advantage.  If  some  principle  of  law,  on  which  the  judgment 
was  founded,  were  to  be  recalled,  this  would  be  a  change  in  the 
law  by  the  legislature  or  the  electorate,  in  so  far  nullifying  the 
work  of  the  court,  putting,  in  the  one  case,  the  legislature  above 
the  courts,  whereas  the  fundamental  idea  of  our  judicial  system 
is  that  this  shall  never  be  done;  in  the  other,  enabling  the  elec- 
torate to  change  the  existing  law  by  chance  vote,  which  is  also 
fundamentally  opposed  to  the  orderly  administration  of  justice, 
as  known  to  civilized  man.  Such  returns  to  pristine  barbarism 
have  not  been  proposed,  so  far  as  I  know,  since  the  Athenians 
made  law  and  recalled  it  through  decisions  ad  hoc,  in  mass-meet- 
ing, and  changed  their  reasons  to  suit  the  case,  as  it  arose — one 
of  the  worst  blots  on  the  civilization  of  the  Athenian  state. 


LIMITATIONS  177 

parently  works  better  in  the  Federal  than  in 
the  State  system,  the  Federal  judiciary  being, 
for  reasons  already  stated,  a  more  powerful  and 
responsible  bench.  In  fact,  it  may  be  said  here 
that  those  who  deplore  the  weakening  of  the 
importance  of  State  rights  in  our  system  over- 
look the  fact  that  it  is  connected  with  the  decline 
of  the  State  judiciary  owing  to  the  elective  sys- 
tem. With  a  subservient  judiciary  ready  to 
vary  or  interpret  the  law  to  suit  the  legislature 
and  the  executive,  the  whole  system  of  consti- 
tutional limitations  which  has  been  the  key  to 
the  stability  of  the  government  would  be  swept 
away.  As  already  pointed  out,  there  is  nothing 
that  popular  bodies  like  legislatures  are  fonder 
of  than  confiscation  of  property.  It  sometimes 
takes  the  form  of  out-and-out  spoliation,  some- 
times that  of  pretended  regulation.  The  hne 
between  the  two  is  not  easy  to  draw  and  noth- 
ing in  our  experience  warrants  us  in  trusting  the 
legislature  to  draw  it.  We  accordingly  intrust 
the  task  to  the  courts,  and  under  the  fifth  or  the 
fourteenth  amendment  they  hold  that  confisca- 
tory legislation  is  not  within  the  powers  of  either 
Congress  or  the  States.  But  that  is  all  that  pro- 
tects us.     Make  the  judges  subservient  to  the 


178         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

machine  or  the  party,  either  by  making  them 
elective  or  by  packing  the  courts,  or  in  any  other 
way,  and  there  is  nothing  that  stands  in  the  way 
of  assaults  on  property  leading  to  confiscation 
on  a  great  scale. 

The  last  thirty  years,  and  especially  the  last 
three  or  four,  have  been  remarkable  for  attacks 
on  property  and  remarkable  attempts  to  pro- 
duce subserviency  among  judges.  Of  these,  the 
most  insidious  and  most  dangerous  is  the  at- 
tempt to  pass  a  bill  to  take  away  or  hamper  their 
power  to  enforce  their  own  decrees.  The  power 
to  enforce  law,  or  declare  a  law  unconstitutional 
is  of  little  value  unless  illegal  acts  can  be  pre- 
vented, and  one  of  the  ordinary  ways  of  prevent- 
ing operation  is  by  means  of  an  injunction, :.  e.y 
the  anticipation  and  prevention  of  wrong.  In 
order  to  cripple  the  courts  in  labor  disputes,  the 
demagogues  have  been  endeavoring  for  years 
to  pass  a  bill  practically  destroying  the  power 
of  a  court  to  enforce  an  injunction  summarily, 
or,  in  other  words,  to  make  its  ov;n  decrees 
respected.  But  no  such  law  can  be  confined  to 
labor  disputes.  It  will  apply  to  all  disputes, 
and  the  moment  such  a  law  is  actually  enforced 
the  authority  of  the  court  is  undermined. 


LIMITATIONS  179 

The  enormous  importance  of  the  subject  can- 
not be  exaggerated.  We  have  staked  the  per- 
manence of  our  system  on  the  judiciary  on  one 
side,  exactly  as  we  have  staked  it  upon  the  vigi- 
lance, character,  and  intellect  of  the  community 
at  large  on  the  other.  We  have  greatly  impaired 
the  efficiency  of  the  latter  by  allowing  machine 
government  to  fasten  its  hold  upon  the  legisla- 
tive branch;  if  we  now  do  not  protect  the  ju-  '  •./* 
diciary  by  every  means  in  our  power,  our  case 
will  certainly  be  worse  than  it  is  now. 

If  these  views  are  sound,  the  survey  which  we 
have  taken  of  the  operation  of  our  government 
points  to  some  definite  conclusions.  In  the  first 
place,  we  have  in  the  government  of  the  United 
States  the  first  attempt  on  a  great  scale  to  intro- 
duce into  the  working  of  a  free  government  the 
fundamental  principles  of  delegation  and  re- 
sponsibihty  to  the  people.  This  is  accomplished 
in  our  Constitution  partly  by  a  system  of  checks 
and  balances  and  Hmitations  of  power,  which 
have  thus  far  answered  remarkably  well  the  ex- 
pectations of  the  designers.  Their  great  dread 
was  that  they  could  not  establish  a  permanent 
union,  and  that  the  country  would  be  split  up, 
as  Europe  has  been,  into  states  hostile  to  each 


i8o         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

other,  armed  against  each  other,  and  frequently 
at  war  with  one  another.  From  the  beginning 
of  the  world,  internal  dissension  and  external 
violence  had  been  the  bane  of  republics  never 
large  enough  to  be  secure.  To  prevent  this,  they 
made  a  federation  of  a  totally  new  kind,  in 
which  the  States  retained  their  sovereignty 
within  a  certain  field,  but  their  citizens  became 
directly  responsible  to  the  central  government. 

It  was  the  imagined  retention  by  the  States  of 
the  sovereign  right  to  withdraw  from  the  Union, 
which  was  only  another  word  for  the  irresponsi- 
bihty  which  they  had  once  enjoyed,  which  led 
to  that  aggrandizement  of  State  rights  that 
ended  in  secession  and  the  Civil  War.  The 
principle  of  union  was  vindicated,  unhappily 
through  war,  and  the  irresponsibility  of  the 
States  disappeared.  It  was  the  result  of  the 
Civil  War  which  justified  everything  that  the 
expounders  of  the  Constitution  had  said  about 
the  impossibility  of  a  strong  free  government 
which  had  nothing  to  keep  it  going  but  a  treaty 
between  equals,  which  equals  might  tear  up. 

The  system  of  checks,  balances,  and  limita- 
tions relating  to  the  executive,  legislative,  and 
judiciary   has   thus   far    proved    its    value   by 


LIMITATIONS  i8i 

maintaining  the  organs  of  government  in  much 
the  same  relative  position  which  they  occupied 
a  hundred  years  ago. 

But  other  forces  have  since  been  called  into 
play  which  were  never  dreamed  of  by  the 
founders  of  the  government. 

These  forces,  so  far  as  they  have  been  called 
into  play  by  design,  have  rested  on  a  fallacy  with 
regard  to  responsibihty  to  the  people — the  fun- 
damental dogma  of  any  free  government — the 
mistaken  idea  that  the  way  to  attain  it  was  the 
selection  of  all  the  agents  of  government  by  fre- 
quent elections  or  appointments  for  short  terms. 
The  result  of  this,  combined  with  universal  suf- 
frage, was  to  introduce  into  the  executive  ser- 
vice all  the  evils  of  rotation  in  office,  and  in  the 
State  judicial  service  all  the  evils  of  an  elective 
judiciary,  and  in  pubHc  life  in  general  to  turn 
over  in  great  measure  to  an  organized  and 
ubiquitous  and  irresponsible  "organization"  all 
nominations  to  office;  thus  often  accomplish- 
ing the  end  of  vesting  the  substance  of  power 
in  the  irresponsible  controller  of  the  machine, 
and  taking  away  all  responsibihty  to  the  people. 

To  aggravate  the  difficulties  which  we  have 
been  considering  tend  all  efforts  to  increase  the 


i82         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

sphere  of  the  government.  A  remarkable  feat- 
ure of  the  government  of  the  United  States  was 
supposed  to  be  that  alone  among  the  great  pow- 
ers its  sphere  of  action  was  strictly  limited.  The 
great  body  of  powers  inherent  in  any  sovereign 
state,  relating  to  education,  health,  morals,  po- 
lice, and  order,  the  security  of  Hfe,  person,  and 
property,  were  within  control  of  the  States, 
where  they  were  before  the  Federal  government 
was  formed.  This  used  to  be  thought  a  great 
safeguard  against  centralization.  No  new  func- 
tions could  be  confided  to  the  general  govern- 
ment except  by  the  amendment  of  the  Consti- 
tution. But  here  the  force  of  circumstances  has 
been  too  great  to  enable  the  States  to  retain  their 
original  power  to  its  full  extent.  Circumstances 
have  changed.  Improvements  in  communication 
never  before  imagined  possible  have  brought 
the  ends  of  the  country  to  each  other,  so  that 
many  things  originally  local  have  in  fact  ceased 
to  be  so.  The  railroads,  for  instance,  have  be- 
come a  net-work  of  lines  extending  across  the 
boundaries  of  States  as  national  highways,  and 
under  the  circumstances  it  is  natural  that  the 
courts  should  gain  a  jurisdiction  over  these,  under 
the  Constitution  itself,  which  could  not  have 


LIMITATIONS  183 

entered  into  the  mind  of  anybody  before  rail- 
roads were  built.  In  this  way  the  sphere  of  the 
Federal  government  has  been,  without  consti- 
tutional amendment,  from  time  to  time  enor- 
mously enlarged.  At  the  same  time  that  of  State 
government  has  been  enlarged  in  other  ways. 

And  we  must  not  forget  that  the  distinction 
between  State  and  Federal  jurisdiction  is  not 
binding  on  the  machine.  The  machine,  which  is 
nothing  but  a  congeries  of  committees  or  smaller 
machines,  is  ubiquitous  and  pervasive.  Any 
particular  machine  is  coextensive  with  the  lo- 
cality covered  by  the  duties  of  an  elective  offi- 
cer, but  any  particular  machine  is  a  part  of  the 
whole.  The  national  committees  are  a  part  of 
it,  but  so  are  all  the  committees  in  the  various 
States  and  towns  which  send  out  invitations  to 
attend  primaries  and  conventions. 

Whatever  enlarges  the  total  sphere  of  the  Fed- 
eral and  State  governments  also  increases  the 
power  of  the  machine  as  a  whole.  The  enlarge- 
ment of  the  sphere  of  any  government  is  always 
accompanied  and  made  possible  by  the  increase 
in  the  number  of  offices,  and  we  must  therefore 
admit  that  the  continual  enlargement  in  the 
sphere  of  Federal  and  State  governments  has 


i84         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

greatly  strengthened  the  machine.  Not  a  year 
passes  that  some  new  scheme  is  not  brought  for- 
ward for  supervising  or  regulating,  or  reform- 
ing human  activity,  or  regulating  property  in 
some  way,  in  the  interest  of  health,  morals, 
justice,  or  education.  Behind  these  movements 
come  an  army  of  applicants  for  office;  and 
office,  except  so  far  as  the  civil-service  rules 
apply,  they  must  obtain  through  the  machine. 
The  extension  of  the  sphere  of  government,  the 
dream  of  the  socialist,  is  bread  and  meat  to  the 
boss.  In  fact,  universal  socialism,  with  no  arti- 
ficial Hmitations  on  power  of  any  kind,  and  with 
all  the  offices  elective,  and  the  terms,  say  six 
months,  would  be  a  machine  paradise.  I  have 
endeavored  to  keep  out  of  view  questions  con- 
nected with  the  sphere  of  government  because 
they  are  different  in  most  respects  from  questions 
concerning  the  operation  of  government.  But 
here  they  mingle,  and  it  is  out  of  the  question 
to  shut  our  eyes  to  the  fact. 

For  the  same  reason  that  I  have  avoided 
discussing  the  sphere  of  government,  I  have 
avoided  going  into  the  question  of  any  but 
artificial  Hmitations;  natural  and  economic  law 
impose  limitations  more  severe  and  inevitable 


LIMITATIONS  185 

than  any  that  can  be  contrived  by  the  wit  of 
man.  The  old  story  of  Canute  and  the  sea 
shows  that  the  fact  of  there  being  natural  limits 
to  pohtical  power  was  long  ago  famiUar.  Dem- 
agogues who  propose  to  the  democratic  sov- 
ereign acts  in  defiance  of  natural  laws  play  the 
part  of  the  courtiers  in  the  story. 

On  these  natural  limits  of  political  action, 
laws,  and  votes,  and  even  constitutions,  have  no 
effect.  And  the  curious  and  very  satisfactory 
fact  in  connection  with  this  is,  that  the  freer  the 
world  becomes  the  more  impotent  to  override 
these  natural  limits  governments  become.  In 
small  primitive  communities  shut  up  within 
narrow  boundaries,  and  with  poor  means  of 
communication  with  the  world  outside,  the  nat- 
ural law  has  less  power;  but  once  throw  the 
whole  world  open  and  make  communication 
easy  and  rapid  and  constant,  and  pohtical 
power  to  interfere  with  natural  law  becomes 
weaker.  It  was  comparatively  easy  to  make 
Sparta  a  permanent  camp,  because  Lacedemo- 
nians who  did  not  hke  the  system  had  no  other 
to  choose.  You  cannot  turn  a  modern  country 
into  a  Sparta  because  citizens  will  take  a  train 
or  a  boat  for  some  other  place,  taking  their 


i86         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

wives  and  families  with  them,  where  they  can 
live  on  easier  terms.  So  that  in  modern  free 
states  the  government  has  to  take  such  military 
institutions  as  the  people  will  submit  to. 

That  this  is  the  case — that  the  most  important 
of  all  limitations  are  those  imposed  by  nature — 
seems  to  be  an  extraordinarily  hard  lesson  to 
learn:  witness  the  still  wide-spread  behef  that 
political  economy,  which  is  merely  an  explana- 
tion of  facts  illustrating  the  working  of  human 
motive  under  certain  circumstances,  is  an  inven- 
tion of  capitalists  and  their  friends  for  the  spo- 
liation of  the  poor.  It  has  been  said  that  indi- 
vidual experience  is  practically  the  only  way 
in  which  the  working  man  learns  that  if  A  is 
forced  to  give  as  much  for  eight  hours'  work  as 
B  in  another  place  gives  for  ten  hours,  A  will 
take  his  work  to  the  other  place;  or  that  a 
laborer  cannot  get  out  of  the  same  production 
the  same  wages  while  doing  less  work;  or  that 
it  is  a  delusion  that  a  laborer  can  force  a  higher 
rate  of  wages  for  a  less  amount  of  work;  or  that 
government  can  enable  him  to  do  so. 

These  hmits  imposed  by  nature  on  political 
contrivances  are  at  the  present  time  very  un- 
popular, and  the  doctrine  is  preached  that  they 


LIMITATIONS  187 

are  not  permanent  limitations  upon  social  forces, 
which  are  supreme.  But  these  natural  laws  or 
permanent  facts  have  an  important  bearing  on 
the  great  question  of  the  sphere  of  government. 
Those  who  disbelieve  in  them  have  no  reason  for 
doubting  that  the  sphere  of  government  can  be 
extended  in  any  direction,  and  for  any  object, 
and  that  the  best  government  is  that  which 
governs  most.^ 

^  The  true  theory  of  the  sphere  of  government,  to  judge  of  the 
future  by  the  past,  will  no  longer  be  an  abstract  one — that  of 
the  "least  government";  but  it  may  perhaps  be  based  on  the 
practical  study  of  what  government  is  forced  to  do  and  what  in 
particular  fields  it  cannot  do.  One  principle  at  the  bottom, 
may  turn  out  to  be  that  where  uniformity  is  necessary,  govern- 
ment must  give  it,  because  it  alone  can  give  it.  It  must  settle  the 
calendar;  it  must  give  us  a  standard  of  weights  and  measures,  and 
the  currency;  it  must  tax  us;  it  must  make  war  and  peace;  it 
must  provide  for  the  administration  of  justice;  it  must  regulate 
and  make  responsible  all  incorporated  bodies;  and,  finally,  though 
this  is  not  a  very  popular  idea  just  now,  it  must  see,  when  it 
establishes  a  system  of  property  rights,  and  those  rights  become 
vested  in  individuals  on  the  faith  of  the  system,  that  they  are 
never  divested  without  compensation.  On  the  other  hand,  where 
uniformity  is  unnecessary,  and  where  divergence  is  innocent,  it 
must  be  made  to  keep  its  hands  oif ;  where  responsibility  and  lim- 
itations are  concerned,  it  must  be  made  to  follow  the  system  of 
responsibility  and  limitations  revealed  as  the  best  from  time  to 
time  by  human  study  and  inquiry;  in  whatever  field  experience 
proves  that  its  citizens  can  promote  their  highest  good  for  them- 
selves, without  inspection,  or  repression,  or  promotion,  or  taxa- 
tion, whether  it  be  religion,  education,  charity,  dress,  art,  litera- 
ture, or  recreation,  let  it  bid  them  God-speed  and  leave  them  alone 
to  their  own  devices. 


LECTURE  VI 
THE  SUFFRAGE 


THE  SUFFRAGE 

Universal  suffrage  has  become  so  much  a  part 
of  our  daily  lives  that  we  are  apt  to  forget  how 
very  modern  a  contrivance  it  is,  how  little  we 
have  studied  its  use,  and  that  it  is  always  on  its 
trial.  There  are  still  living  a  very  few  who 
can  remember  when  it  was  still  a  novelty  in 
this  country;  down  to  a  comparatively  recent 
period  there  were  many  who  hoped  to  see  it 
fail  and  perish.  If  I  remember  right,  it  was 
introduced  into  South  America  before  it  came 
into  use  in  the  United  States;  and,  while  it 
had  been  introduced  there  before,  plebiscites 
were  made  the  foundation  of  the  second  em- 
pire in  France  at  very  nearly  the  same  time 
that  it  was  being  substituted  for  suffrage  based 
on  property  here.  Since  then  it  has  spread  over 
the  world,  and  wherever  popular  government 
has  made  any  headway  the  old  restrictions  on 
the  suffrage  have  been  in  great  measure  swept 
away.  In  empires  and  monarchies,  so  far  as 
these  have  opened  their  doors  to  popular  insti- 
191 


192         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

tutions,  the  basis  of  the  suffrage  has  been  made 
wide.  In  England  and  in  this  country  the  only- 
question  supposed  to  be  open  for  discussion  is 
whether  it  ought  to  be  extended  to  women. 

The  great  advantage  of  the  use  of  universal 
suffrage  for  the  settlement  of  political  questions 
of  the  first  magnitude  is  that  it  is  very  effective 
in  making  a  settlement  final.  When  a  proposal 
has  been  before  the  public  for  years,  has  been 
thoroughly  debated  and  discussed  in  all  possible 
aspects,  and  has  finally  been  voted  upon  and 
either  accepted  or  rejected  by  the  whole  commu- 
nity, there  is  necessarily  a  general  acquiescence 
in  the  result,  partly  because  that  is  the  usual 
way  of  settling  the  dispute,  and  also  because  it 
IS  impossible  as  a  general  thing  to  get  together 
the  partisans  of  a  lost  cause  to  renew  the  fight. 
In  the  field  of  practical  government,  a  decisive 
vote  plays  the  same  part  that  a  decisive  victory 
does  in  war.  The  means  of  going  on  with  the 
struggle  are  not  wholly  exhausted,  but  there  is 
no  longer  any  reason  for  expecting  a  continuance 
of  the  struggle  to  produce  any  different  result. 

This  of  itself,  however,  is  not  enough.  If  uni- 
versal suffrage  merely  settled  matters,  it  might 
'Still  settle  them  so  badly  that  it  would  com- 


THE  SUFFRAGE  193 

pletely  discredit  itself.  Force  and  violence  and 
chance  will  all  settle  matters  in  some  way,  and 
it  is  only  if  universal  suffrage  settles  them  on 
the  whole  as  well  as  can  be  expected  that  its 
introduction  will  in  the  long  run  be  justified. 

The  friends  of  universal  suffrage  have,  in  the 
history  of  this  country  for  the  past  two  genera- 
tions, much  to  point  to  in  their  favor.  It  was  to 
the  decision  of  universal  suffrage  that  both  par- 
ties appealed  in  turn  on  each  of  the  following 
momentous  questions,  which  may  be  said  to 
have  determined  the  course  of  our  history  from 
1850  to  the  present  time — the  restriction  of 
slavery  and  its  exclusion  from  the  territories; 
the  support  of  the  necessary  measures  for  carry- 
ing on  the  war  during  the  rebellion;  the  at- 
tempted repudiation  of  the  national  debt;  the 
policy  of  reconstruction,  civil-service  reform, 
and  the  gold  standard.  That  is  to  say,  on  all 
these  critical  questions  the  appeal  was  to  the  I  "^ 
ballot,  which  in  every  case  finally  sustained  those 
who  took  the  side  which  we  confidently  expect 
will  prove  in  the  end  to  have  been  the  right 
side. 

We  may  perhaps  be  able  to  add  to  these  tri- 
umphs the  decision  of  the  long  battle  now  waging 


194         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

between  what  is  called  Bryanism  and  constitu- 
tional government,  i.  e.y  between  socialistic  at- 
tempts to  make  the  government  an  engine  for 
the  redistribution  of  wealth  through  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  constitutional  power  of  the  courts  to 
enforce  their  own  decrees  and  to  protect  prop- 
erty. If  so,  I  think  there  will  be  a  general  ad- 
mission that  universal  suffrage  has  answered  the 
first  great  practical  test  apphed  to  it  pretty  well, 
and  to  have  justified  the  expectations  of  the  orig- 
inal advocates  of  the  theory  of  popular  govern- 
ment. For  the  foundations  of  that  theory  we 
have  to  go  back,  as  already  explained,  not  to 
Rousseau  or  Jefferson,  but  to  Bentham,  who  was 
the  first  writer  on  government  to  furnish  the 
utilitarian  reasons  for  a  belief  in  it.  It  being 
settled  that  the  welfare  of  the  community  is  the 
object  of  government,  how  is  this  to  be  secured? 
His  answer  was  that  since  this  welfare  was  con- 
tinually threatened  on  every  side  by  sinister 
interests,  and  factions  deriving  their  support 
from  them,  the  only  way  to  secure  it  was  to  de- 
fend it  through  the  power  of  the  only  class  whose 
interest  was  that  welfare,  that  is,  the  power  of 
the  whole  community  itself,  exercised  freely — 
that  is,  through  the  secret  ballot.    But  the  suf- 


THE  SUFFRAGE  195 

frage  of  the  whole  community  is  universal  suf- 
frage, and  the  instances  given  are  instances  of 
the  triumph  of  the  interests  of  the  whole  com- 
munity over  special  interests,  and  what  used  to 
be  called  faction  connected  with  them.  Al- 
though it  is  dangerous  to  reason  from  one  coun- 
try to  another,  especially  to  a  country  of  a  dif- 
ferent race,  language,  religion,  and  laws,  it  may 
be  suggested  that  the  superior  stability  of  the 
present  French  republic  over  the  governments 
which  preceded  it  shows  that  the  working  of 

universal  suffrage,  when  perfectly  free,  is  to-  

ward  a  satisfactory  settlement  of  questions.  Of 
course,  when  universal  suffrage  is  more  or  less 
under  the  control  of  the  executive  it  may  produce 
surprisingly  different  results;  under  the  second 
empire  it  supported  arbitrary  government;  in 
South  America  it  can  be  turned  first  to  the  sup- 
port of  one  revolution,  then  of  another;  but, 
when  it  is  free,  it  seems  to  have  the  power  of 
furnishing  the  great  virtue  of  strength  and  per- 
manence to  the  policy  of  the  state. 

Nor  is  there  any  reason  for  thinking  universal    , 
suffrage  a  bad  contrivance  for  determining  which    |  ^ 
among  a  number  of  candidates  for  high  and  con- 
spicuous executive  office  is  the  best,  provided 


J 


196         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

the  candidates  have  been  a  long  time  before  the 
public  and  their  merits  thoroughly  canvassed 
pro  and  con.  The  successful  candidates  for  the 
presidency  in  the  last  sixty  years  have  compared 
favorably  with  those  of  the  previous  half-cen- 
tury, while  conspicuous  defeats  of  inferior  can- 
didates have  helped  to  re-enforce  the  proof.  The 
two  elections  of  Lincoln,  the  two  elections  of 
Cleveland,  the  defeats  of  Greeley,  Butler,  and 
Bryan,  seem  in  retrospect  to  show  that  the  peo- 
ple as  a  whole  are  at  least  as  likely  to  decide  well 
,  as  the  old  constituencies  founded  on  property 
were.  Its  magnates  have  shown,  perhaps,  less 
originality  than  those  of  the  earher  period,  but 
the  whole  world  is  thought  by  many  persons  to 
have  been  more  full  of  originality  and  character 
under  the  old  regime  than  it  is  now.  The  tre- 
mendous absorption  of  the  most  powerful  and 
ambitious  minds  in  money-getting  is  enough  to 
account  for  this  in  great  measure. 

It  is  not  here  that  the  abuse  of  universal  suf- 
frage is  apparent,  but  in  the  attempt  to  use  it 
as  a  universal  test  for  the  settlement  of  alL 
questions,  no  matter  whether  the  electorate  has 
had  time  to  consider  them  or  not,  and  to  use  it 
as  the  e very-day  machinery  for  enforcing  that 


THE  SUFFRAGE 


197 


"responsibility  to  the  people"  without  which 
popular  government  cannot  last. 

Universal  suffrage,  i.  e.y  the  general  electorate, 
can  answer  a  question  yes  or  no  successfully,  or 
decide  successfully  between  candidates  for  office 
placed  before  it,  if  much  opportunity  for  deliber-  ' 
ation  and  discussion  precedes  its  use,  and  it  is  Uy  >^ 
only  used  at  considerable  intervals  of  time.    As  ' 
applied  to  elections,  it  can  only  exercise  an  in- 
telligent choice  as  to  a  small  number  of  offices. 
The  shorter  the  intervals  and  the  greater  the 
number  of  offices,  the  less  opportunity  for  de- 
liberation and  discussion  in  the  electorate,  the        1/ 
greater  the  power  of  the  machine,  and  the  less 
the  responsibihty  to  the  people. 

There  are  some  things  which  it  cannot  or- 
dinarily do.  Direct  primaries  are  a  contrivance 
for  as  near  an  approach  as  may  be  to  the  use  of 
universal  suffrage,  or  "direct  democracy"  {i,  e., 
the  entire  electorate,  as  divided  into  parties), 
for  the  business  of  nominating  to  office.  Direct 
primaries  would  apply  to  any  office  from  Presi- 
dent and  senators  down. 

The  question  here,  of  course,  is  not  whether 
the  election  secures  responsibility  in  office,  but 
whether  the  nomination  is  really  by  the  elector^ 


1 98         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

ate.  If  my  view  of  the  subject  is  correct,  the 
electorate  cannot,  of  its  own  motion,  make  or- 
dinary nominations.  Nomination  to  office  usu- 
ally is  the  work  of  one  man  or  a  small  num- 
ber of  men,  not  of  the  public  at  large.  You 
cannot  canvass  the  fitness  of  a  man,  or  get  up  a 
"ticket,"  or  slate,  by  means  of  it.  Hence,  pri- 
maries, whether  of  the  old-fashioned  kind  or  di- 
rect primaries,  will  rarely  do  more  than  ratify 
names  from  a  hst  already  prepared  by  somebody. 
The  old  caucus  nominated,  and  a  caucus  can 
nominate  to-day,  but  this  is  because  a  caucus  is 
a  small  and  secret  body  in  which  it  is  possible 
to  discuss  the  thousand  and  one  delicate  ques- 
tions which  enter  into  a  nomination  without 
dread  of  consequences;  but  the  delegate  con- 
vention, invented  to  take  the  place  of  the  caucus 
and  make  nominations  more  popular,  has  seldom 
done  anything  more  than  ratify  nominations  pre- 
pared for  it.  If  the  successful  man  is  a  favorite, 
his  name  is  brought  to  the  convention  by  his 
supporters;  if  he  is  a  "dark  horse,"  the  moment 
when  his  name  is  to  be  made  known  is  prear- 
ranged. Of  real  public  debate  of  qualifications 
of  candidates,  even  in  a  delegate  convention, 
there  is  rarely  any.    The  function  of  the  con- 


THE  SUFFRAGE  199 

vention  is  to  vote;   its  speeches  are  perfunctory 
'* presentations"  of  candidates. 

Exceptions  prove  the  rule.  Occasions  now  and 
then  arise  when  a  very  conspicuous  man  is  forced 
into  nomination  to  high  office  by  a  general  con- 
sensus of  opinion.  The  first  nomination  of  Wash- 
ington, the  second  of  Lincoln,  the  nomination  of 
Mr.  Tilden  against  the  wishes  of  the  machine, 
the  second  nomination  of  Mr.  Cleveland,  and 
the  nomination  in  New  York  of  Governor 
Hughes  are  instances  in  point.  But  in  such  cases 
almost  any  machinery  would  work  in  the  same 
way;  the  press  usually  proclaims  and  advertises 
the  popular  demand,  and  the  machine  gladly 
accepts,  or  is  forced  to  take  the  candidate,  ex- 
actly as  if  it  had  received  a  mandate  from  the 
electorate.^ 

^  The  authors  of  the  Federalist  have  been  criticised  for  not 
perceiving  in  advance  that  the  business  of  nomination  for  office 
is  not  generally  adapted  to  the  canvassing  of  the  constituency 
itself.  The  constituencies  which  they  had  in  mind,  however, 
were  small,  the  suffrage  was  restricted,  and  the  number  of  offices 
which  they  had  in  mind  was  also  small.  It  certainly  does  not  lie 
in  the  mouth  of  the  introducers  of  direct  primaries  to  criticise 
them  on  this  account,  for  their  mistake  consisted  in  thinking  that 
nominations  would  be  managed  by  direct  primary  consultation 
of  voters  under  circumstances  vastly  more  advantageous  to  the 
experiment  than  those  of  our  time.  At  this  date  (May,  1912) 
there  are  in  Kansas — a  typical  Western  community — 10  State 
officers  to  be  elected,  3  justices  of  the  State  Supreme  Court,  i 
United  States  Senator,  8  Congressmen,  13  county   officers,  125 


20O         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

To  go  back  to  the  question  of  the  possibility 
of  obtaining  responsibility,  the  original  idea  was 
that  if  the  representative  (to  confine  the  matter 
to  the  legislature)  did  not  turn  out  well,  he  would 
lose  his  seat.  But  when  elections  are  frequent, 
and  there  is  no  time  for  the  public  opinion  of 
the  constituency  to  have  become  fixed  on  the 
conduct  of  the  representative,  and  when  the  ma- 
chine supports  him  and  gives  him  his  nomina- 
tion, it  becomes  almost  impossible  for  his  con- 
stituency to  enforce  his  responsibility.  I  think 
it  may  fairly  be  said  that  the  amount  of  individ- 
ual responsibility  obtained  to-day  in  the  United 
States  by  the  operation  of  universal  suffrage 
upon  the  legislature  and  Congress  is  at  its  lowest 
ebb.  We  have  already  considered  how  the  mat- 
ter stands  with  respect  to  the  nominations  of 
administrative  officers  which  have  been  made 
elective. 

State  representatives,  40  State  senators,  and  10  presidential  elec- 
tors. It  is  said  that  four  parties  will  have  candidates  for  the 
State  offices,  and  that  there  will  be  at  least  three  for  each  county- 
position.  It  is  calculated  by  the  Secretary  of  State  that  a  body 
of  8,000  men  are  or  have  been  circulating  nomination  petitions. 
He  therefore  suggests  a  new  scheme  for  the  purpose  of  restrict- 
ing the  number  of  candidates  and  reducing  the  volume  of  nomi- 
nating business,  by  providing  that  there  shall  be  an  entrance 
fee  for  candidates,  the  candidate  for  governor  or  member  of  Con- 
gress, for  instance,  paying  $150,  while  for  a  county  office  the 
stake  might  be  lowered  to  $10. 


THE  SUFFRAGE  201 

It  may  be  said  that  every  government  tends  | 
to  perish  through  the  idolatry  of  its  own  fetish.  1 
The  fetish  of  despotism  is  arbitrary  power;  it 
is  appHed  to  everything;  all  questions  are  set- 
tled by  it,  and  it  finally  works  out  its  own  de- 
struction and  the  state's  (military  empires,  such 
as  Alexander's  and  those  of  the  two  Napoleons, 
are  famihar  instances),  leaving  a  crippled  com- 
munity behind  to  work  out  its  own  salvation 
as  best  it  may.  The  fetish  of  aristocracy  is  priv- 
ilege; it  resorts  to  privilege  as  the  oracle  to 
answer  any  question.  Down  to  the  middle  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  the  whole  of  Europe  was 
a  net-work  of  privileges  and  correlated  duties 
originally  embodied  in  the  feudal  system.  When 
Mirabeau  was  asked  how  he  came  to  be  such  a 
believer  in  equahty,  he  said  that  he  did  not  care 
much  about  it  for  its  own  sake,  but  had  taken  it 
as  the  best  club  with  which  to  attack  privilege. 

Democracy  has  at  least  two  idols,  of  which  one 
is  the  false  worship  of  equahty  as  always  an  end 
in  itself,  and  which  treats  it  as  an  object  of 
government  to  introduce  equahty,  not  merely  of 
right  and  opportunity,  but  of  condition;  the 
other,  the  worship  of  the  ballot  as  a  universal 
means  of  curing  all  ills  and  enforcing  responsi' 


a- 


202         THE  DEMOCIL^TIC  MISTAKE 

bility.  The  inevitable  result  is  the  continuous 
exercise  of  elective  machinery,  the  multiplica- 
tion of  elections  and  of  offices,  and  the  division 
and  dissipation  of  responsibihty  for  the  better 
division  of  patronage  and  spoils.  Either  the 
state  must  be  exhausted  by  the  expense  and 
general  irresponsibility  entailed,  or  it  must 
abandon  its  idols  and  give  up  the  false  theory 
of  responsibility  which  deludes  their  worship- 
pers. Of  one  thing  we  may  be  always  sure, 
that  to  the  community  at  large  good  govern- 
ment will  always  be  vastly  more  important  than 
the  forms  by  which  it  is  secured,  and  that  in 
its  effort  to  furnish  this,  any  form  of  govern- 
ment is  always  on  its  trial. 

For  those  who  do  not  believe  in  the  power  of 
free  institutions  to  right  themselves  can  always 
point  to  two  very  serious  defects  in  democratic 
tendencies  which  have  always  marked  it  when- 
ever it  has  been  introduced — its  tejndency  to  at- 
tack property  and  try  to  alter  by  legislation  the 
natural  law  which  gives  the  control  of  it  in  the 
long  run  to  the  thrifty,  the  industrious,  and  the 
ambitious,  and  the  tendency  to  invoke  in  aid 
of  this  process  all  the  power  of  a  centralized 
government,  more  and  more  centralized  for  the 


THE  SUFFRAGE  203 

purpose.  Socialism  and  centralization  are  other 
names  for  these  tendencies.  With  them  have 
often  gone  in  the  past  imperialism  and  militar- 
ism. In  other  words,  it  is  absolutely  true  there 
is  an  inherent  tendency  in  democracy  to  pro- 
duce its  opposite — despotism,  and  we  see  plenty 
of  evidence  of  it  about  us. 

Those  who  maintain,  as  we  maintain,  that 
democracy  has  still  the  power  within  it  to  rectify 
its  course  must,  if  the  view  taken  here  is  correct, 
rest  our  case  on  the  belief  that  the  basis  of  the 
government — the  general  state  of  character  and 
opinion  in  the  electorate — is  sound,  and  that  a 
way  will  be  found  to  substitute  a  true  for  a  false 
theory  of  responsibility.  The  absurd  worship 
of  a  ridiculous  idea  inherited  from  the  past, 
that  if  we  can  only  vote  often  enough,  and  have 
as  many  elective  offices  as  possible,  we  shall  se- 
cure responsibility  to  the  people,  is  the  highway 
to  failure.  If  it  were  true,  we  should  inhabit  a 
political  paradise  in  New  York.  On  election  day 
with  us  every  one  votes  for  a  dozen  candidates 
whose  very  existence,  except  that  their  names 
appear  on  the  ballot,  is  unknown  to  him;  and 
if  he  wishes  to  study  his  rights  and  duties  as  a 
voter,  he  is  referred  to  a  technical  volume  of 


204         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

some  five  hundred  pages,  most  of  which  is  in- 
comprehensible except  to  trained  experts,  and 
told  that  this  so-called  election  manual  is  the 
palladium  of  his  hberties,  and  that  if  it  is  not 
entirely  intelligible  he  can  consult  a  lawyer. 

Continuous  suffrage  is  not  a  final  solution  of 
all  the  problems  of  government,  nor  an  assur- 
ance of  responsibility  in  government;  to  be  suc- 
cessful it  must  be  sparingly  used,  and  only  by 
electorates  which  are  fitted  for  it,  and  only  for 
questions  about  which  there  has  been  ample 
time  for  discussion  and  deliberation. 

Evidences  of  reaction  against  the  false  notion 
that  responsibility  can  always  be  secured  by  a 
vote  may  be  seen  in  several  quarters.  Negro 
suffrage  in  the  South,  apparently  made  neces- 
sary in  the  interest  of  reconstruction,  disap- 
peared through  the  demonstration  of  its  own 
irresponsibility.  Deplorable  as  this  result  may 
seem  in  the  light  of  our  aspirations  for  equality, 
it  is  undoubtedly  more  in  the  interest  of  good 
government  than  equal  suffrage  supported  by 
bayonets  and  ruining  civilization,  such  as  re- 
construction^orce3)  upon  us  to  establish  tem- 
porarily in  the  South.  And  it  is  a  perfect 
illustration    of  how  little    the   community,  in 

C,  >t^c^  a-t-ii^^  *;«  I'     ^  )j-\  —    f^    ^^ 


THE  SUFFRAGE 


205 


the  long  run,  cares  about  an  abstraction  as 
compared  with  good  government,  that  the 
most  languid  interest  has  been  taken,  through- 
out the  country  at  large,  in  the  fact  that  the 
South  has  refused  to  tolerate  the  political 
equality  of  the  races.  The  same  thing  may  be 
said  of  the  general  acquiescence  of  the  country 
in  the  abolition  of  the  suffrage  altogether  in  the 
District  of  Columbia.  Washington  has  been 
governed  for  a  generation  by  an  appointed  com- 
mission. Those  who  choose  to  Hve  in  the  capital 
of  the  United  States  have  no  vote.  To  be  sure, 
the  question  was  complicated  by  Washington 
having  a  large  negro  population;  but  it  was  not 
made  a  race  question.  The  real  reason  why 
Washington  was  disfranchised,  to  the  general 
satisfaction  of  everybody,  was  that  universal 
suffrage  as  applied  in  our  way  through  constant 
elections  and  for  a  multitude  of  officers  had  re- 
sulted in  wide-spread  corruption  and  virtual 
bankruptcy. 

And  it  is  beginning  to  be  seen  now  that  the  use 
of  universal  suffrage,  as  we  have  attempted  to 
use  it,  inevitably  tends  to  produce  the  same  re- 
sult everywhere;  and  in  more  than  one  instance, 
in  smaller  municipalities,  the  system  has  been 


2o6         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

temporarily  swept  away,  and  for  it  substituted 
a  commission  charged  with  plenary  powers  of 
government,  itself  elective,  but  holding  office  for 
a  sufficient  time  to  secure  responsibility,  and 
ridding  the  city  meanwhile  of  the  whole  net- 
work of  subordinate  electoral  machinery  which 
produces  what  we  call  the  machine.^ 

If  the  difficulties  under  which  New  York  and 
Boston  are  represented  by  their  press  as  laboring 
were  attacked,  as  I  have  suggested,  by  substitut- 
ing for  their  present  system  a  commission  with 
full  powers,  elected  by  universal  suffrage,  with 
a  tenure  of  office  lasting  for  a  number  of  years, 
it  would  violate  no  principle  of  popular  govern- 
ment, and  would  for  the  time  put  an  end  to  the 
business  of  the  local  machine.  If  such  a  com- 
mission, with  a  mayor  at  the  head  of  it,  were 
adopted  as  a  permanent  form  of  government,  the 
local  machine  would  go  out  of  business.  It  must 
be  remembered  that  the  work  of  governing  these 
great  cities  in  which  we  live,  and  which  contain 
half  our  population,  is  almost  altogether  admin- 
istrative; it  consists  almost  entirely  of  the  work 
of  policing,  of  sanitation,  of  care  of  streets  and 

*  For  a  full  account  of  the  growth  of  the  commission  system  since 
this  was  written,  see  "Commission  Government  in  American 
Cities,"  by  Ernest  S.  Bradford  (Macmillan,  191 1). 


THE  SUFFRAGE  207 

bridges,  of  parks  and  public  places.  The  laws 
affecting  life,  liberty,  and  property  are  passed 
by  the  legislature;  justice  is  administered  by 
courts  established  by  the  State.  Municipal  ad- 
ministration is  almost  wholly  administrative. 

As  responsibility  is  broken  down  through 
short  tenure  and  frequent  elections,  it  must  be 
restored  through  their  opposites,  longer  tenure 
and  fewer  elections.  The  movement  for  biennial 
legislatures  has  already  been  referred  to.  A 
regular  triennial  legislature  is  probably  all  that 
is  needed,  and  with  this,  of  course,  lengthening 
of  tenure  of  executive  terms. 

To  get  responsibility  you  have  got  to  get  re- 
sponsible men  for  the  offices,  and  responsible 
men  mean  men  who  are  trusted  for  a  time  long  \  j/ 
enough  to  give  them  an  opportunity  to  show 
their  character.  You  cannot  get  a  responsible 
man  for  a  post  involving  the  exercise  of  author- 
ity if  you  tell  him,  "I  am  going  to  make  you 
responsible  for  this  work,  or  the  administration 
of  this  office,  but  if  I  Hke  to  make  a  change  I 
am  going  to  put  in  a  new  man  in  your  place  at 
the  end  of  a  year.**  The  person  selected  will 
answer,  if  he  is  capable  of  responsibility,  "I  can- 
not take  the  place  on  such  terms.    You  must 


2o8         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

give  me  time  to  make  preparations,  to  actually 
accomplish  something,  to  show  what  I  can  do." 
It  may  be  said  that  there  is  a  law  of  responsible 
tenure — that  to  secure  responsibility  the  tenure 
must  be  at  least  sufficiently  long  to  enable  the 
incumbent  to  show  that  he  has  met  the  require- 
ments or  is  unfit  for  them. 

One  of  the  favorite  delusions  of  the  subject  is 
that  higher  salaries  will  of  themselves  increase 
responsibility.  Higher  salaries  may  make  it 
possible  for  a  better  class  of  men  to  take  the 
office,  as  in  the  case  of  judges,  but  they  will  not 
of  themselves  produce  responsibility.  In  New 
York  the  salaries  of  judges  are,  for  this  country, 
high,  but  it  has  not  made  them  much  better — 
most  of  them  owe  both  salary  and  office  to  the 
head  of  Tammany  Hall,  who  can  take  away 
both.  The  Federal  judges,  with  long  tenure 
and  lower  salaries,  are  far  better  illustrations  of 
responsibility  in  office.  The  lengthening  of  ju- 
dicial tenure  in  New  York  has,  it  is  believed, 
produced  an  improvement. 
-  To  review  now  the  whole  field,  we  began  with 
a  statement  that  a  principle  underlying  all 
government  was  responsibility  to  the  sovereign, 
which  in  popular  government  necessarily  means 


THE  SUFFRAGE  209 

responsibility  to  the  people.  So  far  as  popular 
government  attains  its  ends  it  must  be  through 
responsible  agents,  and  consequently  the  fun- 
damental question  with  reference  to  government 
in  this  aspect  is,  How  is  responsibiUty  to  be  se- 
cured and  maintained  ?  Two  answers  only  have 
been  given  to  the  question,  one  that  which  is  em- 
bodied in  the  Federal  Constitution,  and  the 
other  that  which  is  derived  from  the  writings 
and  teachings  of  doctrinaires,  some  of  them  no 
doubt  great  men,  but  doctrinaires  on  this  point 
because  they  undertook  to  deduce  from  an  en- 
tirely sound  principle  relating  to  sovereignty  a 
doctrine  of  universal  appHcation  by  which  all 
poHtical  questions  would  be  answered — the  doc- 
trine that  to  secure  responsibiHty  all  that  was 
necessary  was  to  make  an  agent  of  the  govern- 
ment elective  and  to  give  him  a  very  short 
term  of  office.  Acting  upon  this  mistake,  they 
embodied  it  in  the  later  State  constitutions,  and, 
having  first  introduced  universal  suffrage,  ap- 
plied it  in  time,  not  merely  to  legislatures,  where 
only  it  had  its  original  justification  in  the  long 
historical  struggle  with  the  executive,  but  to 
judges,  governors,  sheriffs,  prosecuting  officers, 
and  almost  every  official,  town,  county,  and  State, 


2IO         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

throughout  the  commonwealth.  Meanwhile,  by 
a  further  and  most  grotesque  misapplication  of 
the  same  idea,  it  was  introduced  into  the  Fed- 
eral service  in  the  form  of  a  civil  service  with  a 
tenure  lasting  no  longer  than  that  of  the  appoint- 
ing power,  accompanied  further  by  the  ancient 
doctrine  of  "rotation";  "rotation,"  kindled  into 
new  life  by  the  delusion  of  frequent  elections  of 
representatives,  was  applied  to  a  branch  of  the 
public  service  in  which  election  had  no  place, 
and  in  which  "rotation"  meant  patronage,  and 
patronage,  as  always,  meant  favor  or  corrup- 
tion. By  this  means  was  originally  estabhshed 
throughout  the  Union  what  is  known  as  the 
machine — which  sapped  the  foundations  of  re- 
sponsibility in  the  Federal  service  by  parcelling 
out  among  senators  and  representatives  the  ap- 
pointments for  which  the  Constitution  made  the 
President  responsible.  Side  by  side  with  this 
grew  up  the  congeries  of  nominating  committees 
and  primaries,  which  found  its  ripest  local  ex- 
pression in  Tammany  Hall,  and  its  wonderful 
congener,  the  New  York  Republican  "organiza- 
tion," and  which  is  aptly  designated  whenever 
it  works  smoothly  as  the  machine,  an  organiza- 
tion of  politicians  and  "workers"  wholly  irre- 


THE  SUFFRAGE  211 

sponsible  to  the  government,  which  determines 
who  shall  and  who  shall  not  be  nominated  and 
voted  for;  which,  embodied  in  the  primaries, 
sends  its  delegates  to  the  conventions,  while 
these  in  time  fill  the  legislature  with  creatures  so 
dependent  that  (to  adopt  the  term  which  Jus- 
tice Hughes  used  of  delegates)  they  too  might 
as  well  on  all  critical  occasions  be  "inanimate." 
This  machinery  very  soon  became  so  perfect 
that  it  extended  its  operations  to  Washington, 
and  there  began  to  fill  the  seats  of  senators  and 
representatives  with  puppets  of  the  machine. 

A  later  stage,  in  which  the  working  of  the  ma- 
chinery becomes  well  understood  and  rich  men 
find  that  it  can  be  conveniently  used  to  get  them- 
selves or  their  agents  into  the  Senate  or  the 
presidency  need  not  be  discussed  here,  but  ob- 
viously it  does  not  promote  responsibiHty  to  the 
people. 

The  main  thing  to  bear  in  mind  is  that  the 
constant  tendency  of  any  such  system  is  uni- 
versal irresponsibility,  i.  e.,  the  disintegration  of 
government  itself.  An  agent  of  the  government 
is  nominally  responsible  to  the  President,  but 
actually  holds  his  power  subject  to  the  favor 
of  the   "senior  Senator"  from  North  Utopia; 


1/ 


212  THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

another  is  responsible  to  the  electorate  for  the 
discharge  of  his  duties  as  a  judge,  but  actually 
to  the  manager  of  the  "Hall,"  for  whom  or  for 
whose  friends  he  is  expected  to  use  his  patronage 
in  return.  The  bipartisan  commission  of  gas, 
electricity,  water,  telephone,  and  telegraph, 
nominally  responsible  in  office,  first  divides  its 
power  into  functions  corresponding  with  the 
differentiation  of  its  patronage;  then  makes  its 
respective  members  channels  through  which  the 
gas  contracts  and  the  electricity  jobs  and  the 
contracts  and  jobs  connected  with  water,  tele- 
phone, and  telegraph  find  their  proper  outlet — 
as  arranged  by  the  irresponsible  boss  or  com- 
mittee at  whose  instance  the  respective  salaries 
of  the  irresponsible  commissioners  are  placed  at 
their  disposal. 

At  the  whole  wonderful  system  the  first  effec- 
tive blow  that  was  ever  struck  was  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  merit  system  in  the  Federal  civil  ser- 
vice, supplemented  now  by  the  same  system  in 
States  and  cities.  This  has  had  the  effect  of 
making  responsible  to  the  people  several  hundred 
thousand  government  agents,  who  were  before 
paid  by  the  government,  but  owed  what  tenure 
they  could  boast  to  unknown,  or  only  too  well 


THE  SUFFRAGE  213 

known,  persons  (themselves  not  responsible  for 
the  conseqenuces  in  anyway).  So  far  the  conse- 
quences of  the  great  democratic  mistake  as  to 
responsibiHty  have  been  brought  to  an  end,  or 
put  in  the  way  of  being  ended. 

At  the  electoral  "machine,"  with  its  cohorts 
of  workers  and  committees  and  delegates  and 
*' bosses,'*  hardly  an  effective  blow  has  yet  been 
struck.  It  often  seems  to  be  in  prime  vigor,  but 
there  are  some  indications  that  this  is  not  so.  At 
any  rate,  if  the  machine  is  to  be  destroyed  it  can 
only  be  through  the  introduction  of  responsible 
government  in  its  place,  and  this  can  only  be 
done  by  retracing  our  steps  and  abandoning  the 
attempt  to  obtain  responsibiHty  through  fre- 
quent elections  and  short  terms  and  the  multi- 
plication of  offices.  Universal  suflFrage  must  be 
left  to  solve  the  problems  to  which  it  is  adapted 
— to  answer  the  serious  questions  of  state  which 
in  a  republic  can  obtain  no  permanent  settle- 
ment in  any  other  way,  and  to  decide  who  shall 
fill  those  offices  of  state  which  are  not  primarily 
judicial  or  administrative. 

All  this  perhaps  throws  some  light  on  the 
question  whether  it  is  worth  while  at  the  present 
time  to  consider  the  question  of  woman  suffrage. 


214         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

If  there  is  anything  in  what  I  have  said,  and  I 
claim  as  corroborative  evidence  nothing  better 
than  the  files  of  the  daily  press,  filled  as  they 
are  with  unceasing  complaints  of  the  evils  the 
causes  of  which  I  have  endeavored  to  analyze,  we 
are  confronted  by  as  momentous  a  problem  as 
has  presented  itself  to  a  free  people,  the  ques- 
tion how  to  restore  responsibility  when  it  has 
been  lost  or  undermined.  The  work  has  been 
begun,  but  the  greater  part  of  it  remains  to  be 
done,  and  for  its  accomplishment  it  seems  to  be 
requisite  that  the  machinery  of  government  shall 
be  greatly  simplified,  that  terms  of  office  shall 
be  lengthened,  that  nominations  shall  be  few 
and  free,  that  elections  shall  be  less  frequent,  and 
judicial  and  administrative  offices  made,  as  far 
as  possible,  non-elective.  In  other  words,  we 
must  go  back  as  far  as  may  be  to  the  scheme  of 
government  which  the  founders  of  the  Federal 
Constitution  had  in  mind  and  away  from  which 
we  had  been  moving  down  to  the  time  of  the 
adoption  of  the  civil-service  reform  To  this 
end  we  must  be  prepared  to  lengthen  legislative 
service,  to  encourage  independent  nominations, 
to  go  back  to  a  tenure  during  good  behavior 
for  judges,  to  put  cities  into  the  hands,  not  of  the 


THE  SUFFRAGE  215 

"Hall"  or  the  "organization,"  but  of  a  smaller 
number  of  fit  men,  holding  office  for  a  long  term, 
under  whom  there  will  be  experts  and  a  per- 
manent civil  service,  and  we  must  endeavor  to 
rid  ourselves  of  the  idea  that  a  modern  capital 
IS  like  a  mediaeval  city,  or  can  derive  the  shghtest 
benefit  from  a  sham  parliament. 

In  a  situation  Hke  this  it  is  proposed  to  add  to 
the  electorate  all  the  adult  women  in  the  com- 
munity. Now,  without  any  regard  to  sex,  it 
seems  to  me  that  after  what  we  have  gone 
through,  and  in  the  light  of  the  experience  we 
have  had,  to  double  the  electorate  would  be  a 
very  foolhardy  experiment,  unless  for  some  very 
grave  reason.  Women  are  undoubtedly  very 
different  from  men,  nor  can  it  be  denied  that 
they  can  play  a  very  active  political  part.  They 
have  commanded  armies  and  fortresses  and 
governed  kingdoms;  and  been  important  factors 
in  upsetting  them.  There  is  no  reason,  there- 
fore, to  think  that  they  would  not  furnish  the 
best  material  for  the  new  machine  which  the 
interests  of  women  would  undoubtedly  demand. 
Fifteen  millions  is  the  number  of  votes  with 
which  the  present  male  machine  carries  on  its 
business,  and  while  some  of  the  interests  of  male 


2i6         THE  DEMOCRATIC  MISTAKE 

voters  are  the  same  as  women's,  a  great  many 
are  not.  But,  whether  we  had  a  new  woman's 
machine  in  addition  to  our  own  or  not,  there 
would  certainly  be  just  twice  the  number  of 
votes  for  the  vote  brokers  of  one  or  both  sexes 
to  deal  with,  and  it  is  therefore  very  hard  to  see 
why  the  proposal  to  let  women  vote  is  not  really 
a  proposal  to  double  the  power  of  the  machine, 
or,  at  any  rate,  vastly  to  increase  it.  Whether 
the  suffrage  is  a  privilege  or  a  right  or  a  burden, 
the  community  at  large  must  determine  on  what 
terms  and  by  whom  it  is  to  be  exercised;  but  at 
a  time  that  it  is  beginning  to  be  perceived  that 
we  have  seriously  increased  our  difficulties  by 
giving  suffrage  tasks  to  perform  for  which  it  is 
unequal,  it  seems  rather  absurd  to  plunge  our- 
selves into  worse  complications  by  doubling  the 
whole  electorate,  and  consequently  making  all 
the  machinery  twice  as  cumbrous  as  it  now  is. 
Democracies,  like  individuals,  are  ruined  on  the 
side  of  their  natural  propensities,  and  if  democ- 
racy is  to  be  saved,  it  must  be  by  its  women  as 
well  as  its  men  learning  that  we  are  not  saved  by 
worship  of  false  gods.  Any  man  in  mature  life 
who  reflects  upon  the  paltry  amount  of  real  in- 
fluence a  single  vote  means,  in  comparison  with 


THE  SUFFRAGE  217 

the  authority  which  character,  intelligence,  abil- 
ity, eloquence,  and  wealth  bring  to  bear  upon 
affairs,  must  find  something  very  pathetic  in  the 
simplicity  which  imagines  that  responsibiUty  in 
government  will  be  increased  by  doubling  the 
size  of  the  electorate.  To  the  machine,  of  course, 
any  increase  in  electoral  business  is  a  direct  ad- 
vantage. 


"^Hrs  BOOK  IS  DUT. 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  starai>ed  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 

Renewed  books  are  subjea  to  immediate  recall. 


REC'D  ,_.. 


JUN13  m\ 


i 


V1P*6\W 


^^^^^^cn 


QCT5     1961 


K.  230c*'^^^^ 


OCTai-iaKi 


REC'D  LD 


MAY  28  1963 


LD  21A-50m-12/60 
(B622l8l0)476B 


General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


U3^      V' 


^ 


*"*^     ryn  I  c: 


DC.  BERKELEniBBABIES 

,  'niiiini 


/^. 


-^< 


25468) 


/ 


